Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^NINE TIMBUKTU, SOVIET STONEHENGE, AND GNARLY-ASS JUNGLE ^{MALI, GEORGIA, THE PHILIPPINES, AND COLOMBIA} Winter and Spring, 2006

Five days after I had arrived home from the Pacific, I left New England for Africa. In the midst of the crisis in Iraq, which threatened all-out sectarian war, the U.S. military was following up on earlier deployments in the Sahara and Sahel, culminating a long deployment in the Caucasus, expanding another in the Philippines, and continuing yet another in South America. Rather than take a deep, vertical look at a single operation as I was accustomed to doing, this time, accompanied by a three-man British film crew, I would do a quick, horizontal sweep of four separate deployments on different continents.

I started in Timbuktu, Mali, a place that even in an age of globalization and tourist clichés lived up to its reputation, suggestive of the ragged edge of the earth. An Army Special Forces A-team had requisitioned an old hotel there that had the air of a foreign legion outpost, with archways fortified by sandbags, overlooking desert and the scarred remnants of a Niger River tributary. I slapped the mattress in my room and the air went black with dust. Blinding sandstorms stole away the landscape, except for the mournful sounds of donkeys and banging doors. “The donkeys carry rocks and are beaten all day by kids with sticks,” one Special Forces sergeant told me. “They must have been child molesters in an earlier existence, and this is their punishment.” My teeth crunched grit when I closed my jaw. You could set fire to the air.

A smattering of vegetation, neem and acacia trees mostly, constituted the last flickering reports of the great Niger itself, which lay about seven miles to Timbuktu’s south. The river was wide enough to generate its own micro-climate, so pale in its blueness that it exaggerated a sky whitened by dust. Pirogues lined its shoreline, disappearing into the distance like scattered toothpicks. Beyond Timbuktu, in the opposite direction toward the Sahara Desert in the north, this thin coat of vegetation—of civilization, really—all but vanished. From this point all the way to Tamanrasset in Algeria, where I had been the previous summer with another 10th Group A-team, there was nothing for a thousand miles but a tyranny of distance, much like the Pacific. Simply put, there were too few landscape features to funnel the movement of human traffic, so the borders of these Saharan countries became uncontrollable, next-to-meaningless lines on a map, discernible only by GPS.

Taking off a few days from training with a Malian infantry company, five members of the A-team left Timbuktu to survey the desert a third of the way to the Algerian border. They wore civilian clothes and packed 9mm Berettas under their shirts, as well as a few M-4s in the trunks of Toyota Land Cruisers. Capt. Bill Torrey, a West Point graduate from Winter Springs, Florida, who had logged many months on the ground in Iraq and in the Balkans, wanted to meet local tribal leaders and identify potential landing strips, as well as sites for humanitarian relief work. As he put it, “We want to set the conditions that will prevent the emergence of terrorist activities.”

Mali’s government didn’t so much rule the north of the country as maintain a ceasefire with the Tuaregs there. Once again, the point was for the U.S. military to get into a place early, fast, and with a small footprint to try to do some good, so that it wouldn’t need a bigger one later on. Even if the Salafist terrorist threat was exaggerated, much like the Cold War, it served as a useful pretext for military engagement with obscure parts of Africa: something that helped stabilize newly civilian regimes and got relief aid to places otherwise forgotten. It also fostered relationships with local intelligence assets of the kind the American military wished it had had in Afghanistan and elsewhere following 9/11.

From the standpoint of where we were headed, Timbuktu—a cosmopolitan caravan nexus before it was overrun by the Moroccans toward the end of the sixteenth century—with its gray, mud-brick houses, a couple of paved roads, a little museum of medieval Islamic manuscripts, and an occasional satellite dish—represented the modern world that we would be leaving behind. Rather than being the ragged edge of the earth, Timbuktu was actually next door to it.

The convoy consisted of five Land Cruisers and pickups, three of which were Special Forces and the others Malian Army escorts. Mine was driven by an 18 Delta (medic), a staff sergeant who was, in his own weird way, typical SF. A foster child shuttled from one home to another as a kid, he had found love and stability with an evangelical Christian family in rural Oklahoma. As he told me, his foster father, a policeman, was “a real man.” That is, he loved and protected his family, was at ease with risk, and didn’t need an audience to be heroic. This staff sergeant believed that such manhood also required religious virtue. Like others in SF, he had an abiding respect for the Marines. He didn’t think much of the regular Army, though, except for its Alaska-based infantry battalions. As he put it to me, the brutal climate of Alaska made for unit cohesion and personal excellence. “Alaska’s a real frontier,” he kept repeating.

He didn’t want his name used because, as he told me, he thought of accomplishment in terms of personal anonymity. Getting credit for something spoiled it for him.

He and the driver of the other Land Cruiser, a sergeant first class from rural Minnesota, who was an 18 Bravo (weapons specialist), had recently served together in Iraq. The pair had assisted marines during Second Fallujah in November 2004, and afterward trained Iraqi soldiers outside Baghdad. They had also worked as a two-man human intelligence team (HIT), going out alone dressed in beards and civilian clothes to meet with Iraqis who were too scared to meet publicly with Americans. It was a risky assignment, in which it was easy to be set up. The pair that followed them in the job were killed.

These two Green Berets had left for Mali almost immediately after returning from Iraq. They had families whom they missed, but they called those who complained publicly of overly long deployments “parasites.” As I said, they were typical SF sergeants—the kind I had been meeting again and again for the past four years.

We were headed for Araouane, not so much a town as a few wells with some inhabitants that was a name on a map, as though it were the size of Cleveland. The information age created the illusion of knowledge where none existed. Nobody in Timbuktu really knew if anyone still lived in Araouane, and if so, what the security and health situations were there. Did the inhabitants have worms? Did they need eyeglasses? Was there a functioning school? Nor did anyone in Timbuktu seem to know who had been passing through Araouane—a former French colonial outpost for the regulation of nomads on the caravan route to Algeria in one direction, and to Mauritania in the other. Information as to what route to take from Timbuktu to Araouane was also confusing. Roads did not exist so much as “tracks.”

We thought it would take four hours to reach Araouane. It took eleven. We averaged under fourteen miles per hour. We passed camel trains bearing salt to Timbuktu. We got stuck in the sand, had flat tires, suffered overheated batteries, and so on. The bumps and skid-outs were relentless. The sand spread like water under the tires, as we passed one micro-terrain after another: going from shining, hard-packed flats to normally fine sand, to flour, to moon dust. The African-American team sergeant from Far Rockaway, New York, called it a “shaking-out process. You find out all your weak points,” he told me. Our Malian escorts got stuck just as often. They leveraged the fact that they were native to the area, but in fact, coming from Timbuktu, they were also city boys who were less comfortable in the desert than the Tuaregs.

Araouane, which we reached just after sunset, turned out to be a huddle of ruins on a bleached, khaki emptiness. As far as the horizon there was only an unending sandpit. An ancient man in dust-stained Tuareg headgear greeted us. He explained that the men of the village were either mining or trading salt in the desert, so only the women, children, and old people like himself remained, with just enough to survive. The Malian state did not exist here. With the coming of democracy, there was even more pressure on politicians to spend all the aid money in the populous south, near the capital of Bamako, where the votes were. The default situation for a Tuareg was movement: conducting raids, banditry, and commerce on the caravan routes. So the absence of working-age men was normal. It took seven days by camel to reach Timbuktu, the old man told us.

“What kinds of people live here?” Capt. Torrey asked.

“Tuaregs and Songhai,” the man said. “And outside,” he continued, pointing to the surrounding vastness, “Arabs.” By that he meant lighter-skinned strangers who spoke varying degrees of Arabic.

We laid out sleeping bags after a dinner of cold-weather MREs: tastier, more filling, and with even more calories than the MREs I had become accustomed to, but awkward to prepare since they did not self-heat with water like the normal kind.

Following sunup, Capt. Torrey and the evangelical staff sergeant from Oklahoma set up an eye clinic inside one of the ruins. They unpacked little boxes of adaptable eyewear, an ingenious low-tech device manufactured by the U.S. Agency for International Development. These were round, Harry Potterish, horn-rimmed glasses of zero prescription which increasingly strengthened as you pumped a clear gel solution attached to the frame inside the glass. The SF guys called them “never-get-laid-again” glasses, because of how they made you look.

At first, only the old men came to have their eyes checked and get glasses. They would not let the SF guys touch their women. Luckily, also among us was Army Maj. Holly Silkman of Colorado Springs, Colorado, visiting from European Command (EUCOM). As soon as she entered the hut women began appearing with their children, as though by magic.[105] Wearing loose civilian clothes and a purple head-scarf, Maj. Silkman looked as if she might be a Peace Corps volunteer. The sergeant first class from Minnesota, recently back from Iraq, snapped pictures for a photo album that he planned to give the villagers on a succeeding visit—a visit for which Capt. Torrey was already making a to-do list. The next time the team came here, it would have to bring smaller-sized eye frames for the children, school supplies, and medicine for worms and so forth, in order to conduct a full-scale medical civil action program (MEDCAP).

“We could conduct a JCET here,” Torrey told me—that is, camp out nearby and train with the Malian Army for a month to hone desert survival skills. For a small amount of money you could do a lot with this outpost and others like it spread across the Sahara. As in the Pacific, it was through relationships more than through technology that you conquered the tyranny of distance. But setting up a network took time. Progress would be slow and organic, and measured subjectively in successive layers of trust. Such things you could not quantify or objectify; thus they were the very things that congressmen and generals in Washington had the least interest in, because of the pressure to show “concrete results fast.” And yet you could cover most of Africa with A-teams in places like Araouane for the price of only one F-22 fighter jet, for which it was easier to get funding.

Hours passed. More women and children kept streaming into the hut. By late morning, the evangelical staff sergeant, who had driven eleven hard hours the day before, and had slept only a few hours in the sand—a sleep interrupted by guard duty—was still smiling and joking by way of sign language with the patients.

Meanwhile, Capt. Torrey had disappeared for an hour to meet with the elders. He drank a lot of chai, and made a monetary gift of $100 to the village that he would justify to the U.S. Army bureaucracy by claiming it was for the overnight sleeping accommodations. “What can I tell the higher-ups that I accomplished here?” he asked rhetorically. “Only that I drank tea and turned a bunch of kids into Harry Potters. It’s the intangibles that you can’t measure. If we don’t spend a little money in this region, sooner or later the bad guys will.”

Two days later I was on a bleak, rippling plain, my boots stuck in gluey mud, shivering in a cold drizzle outside Tbilisi, Georgia. Before me was a Soviet Stonehenge of half-finished, pebbly-cement structures from the 1980s that U.S. Marines were using to train a Georgian Army battalion in military operations in urban terrain (MOUT). Smoke bombs, flash bangs, and artillery simulators all went off at once as marines mounted an ambush against the Georgian soldiers with whom they were working. The marines had role players mimic screaming, abusive civilians, since the Georgians had to learn not only how to fight in urban areas, but also how to handle noncombatants in a civilized, professional manner, regardless of how much they were provoked.

On this same bleak plain of Krtsanisi in 1795, a Persian army had defeated a much smaller Georgian one. The Persians had invaded only because the Russians under Catherine the Great did not live up to their treaty obligations, so when Russia withdrew its troops from Georgia a vacuum was created that Persia filled. The Persians went on to destroy Tbilisi and massacre its inhabitants. Laid bare to the Persians from the south and to Dagestani marauders to the northeast, the various Georgian kingdoms and principalities had no choice but to allow the complete annexation of their country by the Russians, who stayed for the next 190 years, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This only led to another series of attacks on Georgia’s historic borders, as Abkhazians in the northwest and Ossetians in the north ethnically cleansed their Georgian communities and established breakaway republics. At the same time, predominantly Muslim Ajaria in the southwest emerged as a semi-independent warlordship, even as Chechen raiders from the northeast infiltrated through the Pankisi Gorge. The Georgians had not helped their own cause by tearing themselves apart in a civil war.

It was thanks to the Machiavellian deal-making of the former Soviet foreign minister and ethnic Georgian Eduard Shevardnadze that a semblance of normality was restored here, and the separatist rebellions quieted—that is, until Shevardnadze himself was toppled in a peaceful, democratic uprising in late 2003, known as the Rose Revolution. The advent of full-fledged democracy in Georgia was what allowed for the ramping up of the Marine-led training mission, under the control of EUCOM in Stuttgart.

The Marines aimed to professionalize the Georgian military so that it could stabilize its own borders. Deploying Georgian detachments to Iraq and Kosovo would fast-forward their learning curve. As for the Marines, who had recently contributed a detachment of their own to Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Georgia train-and-equip mission constituted a prototype for the Special Forces–type training missions in which the leathernecks would henceforth be involved.

“There was nothing here a few years ago—no army, no security force—the Russians could have simply walked in and nobody could have done anything about it,” said Lt. Col. Billy McGowan of Land O’ Lakes, Florida, the Marine commander in Georgia. Now, in addition to Marines, there were Navy corpsmen training Georgians in combat medicine, and private contractors training a Georgian Army reconnaissance company. Indeed, there were actually young Georgian officers who had been to both TBS (The Basic School) at Quantico, Virginia, and Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, respectively the best and toughest schools the Marines and regular Army had to offer. Very few Americans in uniform had been to both.

An age of democratization was also an age of military professionalization, for without a disciplined military developed along Western lines, it was doubtful that a new democracy like Georgia’s would remain one for very long. Nevertheless, you had to wonder about what was being created here. Going in with a small footprint as in Georgia and Mali meant there was relatively little at stake in the event the deployment went sour. But the very fact of a small footprint also meant that you had little control over the product being produced. True, U.S. military assistance was provided only to recognized democracies, the exceptions being such places as Pakistan and Egypt, where the alternative seemed worse. But Georgia illustrated the risks of military aid in support of democratic uprisings in places with nonexistent institutions and border disputes, even though these same revolutions, in and of themselves, had to be admired.

In fact, democracy did not necessarily signify stability or economic growth. Tbilisi, since the last time I had visited in 1999, had grown from a charming little city to a better-lit, more substantial one, with a smattering of new hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs.[106] And if you didn’t journey far beyond downtown, you might even call Georgia a success story. Beyond the capital, though, this was a mean, ruined ex-Soviet republic ruled by muscle rather than by the rule of law, with knots of men who looked more comfortable wearing black ski masks than business suits. Nor had the border situation improved much. While the crisis with Ajaria seemed alleviated, the one with South Ossetia was worse.

New democracies had populist tendencies. Georgia’s democratic president, Mikhail Saakashvili, had used the tensions with South Ossetia to deflect attention from Georgia’s economic woes. There was a rich legacy for him to exploit. In the nationalist rebellions in the Caucasus that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Russian-backed Ossetes had expelled ethnic Georgians in a bout of ethnic cleansing. The South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali had not improved since I had visited there seven years ago. It remained a shabbier, more untamed version of the worst parts of Georgia. The women in the street were beautiful and the men looked like gangsters and slobs. It was a chaotic region where politics were inseparable from criminality.

The Georgians hated the Ossetes and wanted the autonomous territory back. Meanwhile, under Vladimir Putin’s low-calorie dictatorship, the Russian empire was attempting to reconstitute itself in the North Caucasus and had placed “peacekeepers” on Georgia’s border with South Ossetia, a mere hour’s drive from where the Marines were training Georgian troops. American imperialism was about going abroad in search of security at home and, as a consequence, enmeshing itself in all the world’s anxieties.¹

Of course, volatile borders and rebellions existed in many of the places I had been with the U.S. military. But everywhere else, the problems were terrorist-related. Here they were less so, despite the infiltration of some Muslim Chechens. In fact, training the Georgians was the quid pro quo for their helping us in Iraq, as well as a means of encouraging democracy in the Caucasus and linking Georgia more directly with NATO. Even so, a further NATO expansion eastward to include a country like Georgia was unlikely. Georgia did not have a European tradition beyond Tbilisi’s architecture and circle of intellectuals. The rest of the country was heavily Oriental. The strength of Georgia’s mafias and the weakness of its governing institutions attested to the predominant influence of Persia’s clan and tribal system over that of Russia’s bureaucratic tradition, which, however coarse, at least represented the rudiments of an impersonal, law-based system.

Yet, the Marines loved this place. The red wine was rich and good. A bottle of good vodka at a restaurant cost $5; a meal for six with alcohol was $25. The women had sad, intoxicatingly dark expressions and the noble bearing of Eastern princesses. And they were always on the lookout for Western husbands and boyfriends, much like German women had been on the lookout for GIs in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The problem in Georgia—a milder version of what I had seen in the Philippines three years before—was keeping the guys in check.²

Intensifying the situation was that young marines were sent to Georgia not for three or six months but for a year, so obviously there was a tendency to go native. As one marine told his commander, “I’ll reenlist if I can stay in Georgia.” The commander, Lt. Col. McGowan, later complained to me, “That’s not at all what being a marine is about!” I wondered if the Marines themselves would change, given that joining SOCOM meant more such exotic deployments like this one. When site survey teams planned such deployments, the most important thing to do was to scout out the bars and nightclubs, I thought. Once again, it was the intangibles that mattered more than the objective facts. To wit, how attractive and friendly were the local women?

Next stop, the Philippines. Since the summer of 2003, when I had last visited Zamboanga, on the southwest tip of Mindanao, the unconventional warfare operation against the Islamic insurgents of Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf had been extended southwestward, from the island of Basilan to Jolo, the other large island in the Sulu Archipelago.[107]

The Philippines was the flip side of Iraq. In Iraq, the failure of the interagency process in Washington had been in plain sight. I had seen not just the U.S. Army but the whole Potomac River bureaucracy as an industrial-age dinosaur in which one massive governmental department had little coordination with another. Because the original invasion of Iraq had been a purely military affair, it succeeded. (Whether it was also a strategic mistake or not was something that would be debated for years.) But the occupation was a civil-military affair—that is, an interagency affair—and that was one reason, among others, it failed.

But in the Philippines the effort to marginalize the al-Qaeda–linked Islamic insurgents of Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf was succeeding precisely because it was a civil-military affair. The interagency process was working here for two reasons. First, there was the advantage of scale. The operation was initially confined to one island, Basilan, and then to another, Jolo, so the number of bureaucrats and troops involved was limited, and therefore so was the interference from Washington. Second, there was the colonial legacy of the United States in what American troops nostalgically referred to as the “P.I.,” the Philippine Islands. Like nineteenth-century European colonialism around the world, this particular colonial legacy highlighted a seamless relationship between diplomats, aid workers, and men in uniform. Thus, there was a long-standing tradition among diplomats inside the American Embassy in Manila to psychologically view the military not as “the other” but as one of them. The same went for the soldiers. As Col. Jim Linder of Fort Lawn, South Carolina, told me, “To do my job right, I am embedded inside USAID [the United States Agency for International Development].”

Col. Linder was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOTF) in Zamboanga. A graduate of Clemson University, he was from a family of farmers and had gone to school to become a better one. But he joined the Army instead and never looked back. Linder illustrated something crucial about the military:

The military was a world of structure to an extreme extent. For example, it could take a teenage hoodlum and turn him into a command sergeant major by the time he was forty. Structure, in the military’s case, was not democratic. In fact, it was vaguely authoritarian. Men who exuded an almost vestigial sense of authority had a distinct advantage. Jim Linder had it. His stony, unblinking expression could be intimidating.

Such a vestigial sense of authority also featured a simplicity of expression: a clear advantage in communicating a commander’s intent down through the ranks. Civilians understandably found American military expressions like “good guys” and “bad guys” childish, corny, and off-putting. This was true not only of civilians but also of military men from other countries, such as Great Britain, who, while also exuding manly authority, thrived on understatement. But whereas the British tradition was the product of a millennium of an island nation’s sea-based defense, the American military tradition also featured an army one: of settling a frontier in a very short space of time, barely a century and a half ago. Because of its very violence, crudity, and singularity of purpose, the Army’s frontier legacy helped breed a black-and-white way of talking.

All this came together in the person of Jim Linder, the South Carolina farmer. Col. Linder’s simple talk was doubly effective—inside and outside the ranks—since he also had to play the role of a politician in selling the American military to the Muslim Filipino civilians of Jolo and Basilan. He was a warrior-diplomat to the extent that he did almost no fighting but a lot of public speaking.

“We were told that the Muslim Tausugs [the ethnic group on Jolo] would steal from us, and knife us in the back after we gave them aid. After all, for hundreds of years on Jolo there were clan wars, banditry, piracy, kidnapping for ransom. The Tausugs would kill you because, just because…. But,” Linder went on, “I have the luxury of being a soldier. That means I have a mission in which I do not intend to fail.”

He told me this over dinner the first time we met, at a restaurant in Zamboanga. Everything he told me that night I heard him repeat over and over again before crowds of Filipinos in Jolo and Basilan.

“I will fortify the moral high ground. People will attack me with stories about Abu Ghraib and the killing of Filipino civilians a hundred years ago by American troops, actions which I cannot defend. And I will respond that my troops can build a school, or fix a little girl’s cleft palate at a MEDCAP, whereas all the guerrillas of Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah can offer is a suicide vest. I will build my fortress on deeds, because I know that the only force protection I have is the goodwill of civilians. All the guns in the world won’t keep an IED from going off.”

This was much the same message that Marine Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis had given me at Camp Pendleton, California, prior to the deployment of the 1st Marine Division to Iraq’s Sunni Triangle in the late winter of 2004. Jim Mattis had told me that our best eyes and ears would be the locals of whom the Marines had to win the trust. Ultimately, that did not happen, not because of want of trying by Mattis’s marines, but because of events outside their control in a theater of war in which his marines were just one element on the American side.[108] The Philippines was a different story, though.

As one SF A-team captain on Jolo would tell me: “The majority of people on Jolo have never seen a Westerner, let alone an American, and their form of communication is word of mouth, not newspapers and certainly not the Internet. So they have no preconceptions about us. And we’re bringing them things like health care which they don’t have.”

A hundred years ago to the month that I would visit Jolo, Capt. John “Black Jack” Pershing defeated the Muslim Moros (actually Tausugs) in a counterinsurgency campaign that eventually led Pershing to the command of American troops in Europe during World War I. But modern development had left Jolo behind, and this same population had little ill will toward the Americans who were here to help it.

The insertion of American forces into Jolo in late 2005 and early 2006, like the one into Basilan in 2002, was accomplished under the auspices of Balikatan, Tagalog for “Shoulder to Shoulder,” an annual American-Philippine joint military exercise. I had heard that the top civilian leadership in the Pentagon hated the fact that they had to hide such troop insertions under the cover of annual exercises, as if the United States had to apologize for hunting down terrorists. But if true, these leaders had it backward. The whole object was to downplay the American military footprint. The more indirect and softer the approach, the more likely that it would be accepted by the local media and population.

I flew with Col. Linder from Zamboanga to Jolo on an Army C-12. Through the gloomy cloud cover the island revealed itself as raw, dense jungle with a lot of primary hardwood forest. From the air, Jolo Town was just a sprawl of corrugated shanties. On the ground, I was immediately oppressed by a rotting, grimy humidity that spoke of mold and snakes and dirty towels. With the exception of coconut palms that signified secondary growth tracts, the island probably looked much as it did when Pershing had been here—the first time in history when American troops fought Islamic guerrillas.³ “It’s a gnarly-ass terrain,” Linder said.

Jolo had a larger, more predominantly Muslim population than Basilan, with a more rugged landscape, all of which made it easier for insurgents.[109] Jolo truly had a tendency of being beyond the law. To understand why, all one had to do was look at a map. It was halfway between Mindanao and the Malaysian part of Borneo, with which it historically did much trade. Before the coming of the Spaniards, Jolo had been an independent sultanate. Manila and the rest of Luzon, from which the Philippines was governed, had little reality on this island. Just as Fallujah’s obstinacy and independence were partly a product of its being on a historic smuggling route from Mesopotamia to Syria, Jolo’s was similar: it was located on a historic smuggling route between the Philippines and Borneo.

I traveled around Jolo for several days, visiting base camps that had once been hideouts for Ramzi Yousef, the organizer of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and Radulan Sahiron, an Abu Sayyaf leader, both of whom were now behind bars. The fact of their presence on Jolo was testimony to the organic links between a worldwide group like al-Qaeda and a local one like Abu Sayyaf, as well as to the efficacy of the remotest, most primitive locations as camps for the planning of terrorist operations of global consequence.

I stayed with Special Forces A-teams embedded with Philippine Army and Marine detachments, as well as with active-duty civil affairs teams out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. On Jolo and on more distant islands closer to Borneo were also Marine engineering units, Navy Seabees, and SEAL teams. The USS Mercy, one of the Navy’s only two hospital ships, was planning a stop here, a place where USAID projects were interwoven with military ones. Every project was directed at two target groups: military-age males, who could make the wrong choices as to their loyalties; and women of childbearing age, who were the motors of cultural change.

The Americans here were all in uniform, with red, white, and blue flags Velcroed onto their sleeves, no less. This included the Marines, who normally eschewed the wearing of flags and other insignias. Col. Linder had given the order for all American troops in Mindanao and Sulu to wear flags, which he called the real symbol of “jointness,” and of “our idea of freedom.”

Context is everything, and because American troops in Basilan and Jolo had never overtly taken part in combat operations but had overtly participated in MEDCAPS and other humanitarian projects, the uniforms and the flags had not only been accepted by the indigenous Muslim populations, but by the Filipino national media as well, despite the legacy of American colonialism.

Of course, the picture wasn’t altogether pretty. As Linder kept repeating to me, “This is a no-shit war zone, and we will spill American blood here.” He was openly afraid that one day an IED, courtesy of the remaining insurgents hiding in Jolo’s dense jungles, would kill some of his men and the American public would suddenly become nervous about the military presence on these islands. As if on cue, the day after I left Jolo a bomb went off in a grocery store, killing a handful of civilians and wounding many more.

“We’re at war here,” Linder’s command sergeant major, Tim Strong of Concord, New Hampshire, told me, emphasizing the potential dangers of this deployment. While one could be forgiven for thinking this a bit of an exaggeration (given the near absence of American military casualties in the Philippines since 9/11), it was such an attitude in and of itself that had helped keep the Philippines out of the news. Whenever traveling by road in Jolo, Americans were in full kit and body armor. It looked ridiculous, but it also made them such hardened targets that it helped dissuade the insurgents from attacking them.

It was difficult to calibrate the extent of the threat. But as the failure to deploy massive numbers of troops in Iraq following the invasion had attested, it was better to over-than to under-compensate. In any case, as one team sergeant on Jolo told me, “If I have one hand on my pistol grip, I make sure the other hand waves. The meaner we look, the softer we have to act to the local people, to show them we’re not just a bunch of bullies.” Added Col. Linder: “Our image is fragile. If we so much as spit tobacco in the wrong direction, we will break the rucksack of responsibility and trust that we carry.”

The sergeant major’s comment about being at war had another connotation, of which he was quite explicit. While the term “Global War on Terrorism” was something the American public was skeptical about, since all it ever saw on television were Iraq and Afghanistan, for the troops themselves, deployed all over the world, it really was a “global” war in terms of their personal experiences.

Maintaining goodwill required the most restrictive rules of engagement (ROEs). One night I found myself on a beach in a thatched hut, where an A-team was billeted alongside a Philippine marine detachment. The A-team commander was yet another clean-cut and earnest West Pointer. He had a face and expression that Americans would trust instantly. Too bad he insisted on going on camera with a boonie hat and sunglasses, to conceal his identity.[110] He called himself “one of the last of the pure,” who joined SF before 9/11, before Special Forces became trendy, as he put it. Anyway, the restrictive ROEs really hit home upon encountering this A-team. Though the team was here to “advise and assist” the Philippine marines, it turned out that it couldn’t train them, train with them, or go out on missions with them—officially, that is. In point of fact, it couldn’t be seen doing any of those things. But whatever it might or might not have been doing behind the scenes, it was striking how its mere presence constituted a confidence-building measure for those in the immediate vicinity.

Indeed, it is said that half of life is showing up; the same often with deployments. Unlike the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, a thousand-mile stretch of lawless badlands with seamless egresses to the great urban areas of Pakistan, where anyone could disappear, Jolo was an island. Escape by sea was possible, but not nearly as easy as slipping beyond the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Unlike that region, the relationship here between the inhabitants and the American military was very good thanks to an emphasis on aid projects. Therefore, sooner or later, the Americans, like this A-team, seemingly doing little, might well get lucky with actionable intelligence regarding the capture of the remaining Abu Sayyaf leaders.

Back in Zamboanga I paid a visit to the JSOTF located on the Philippine Army base of Camp Navarro, where I had stayed in 2003. At that time, the JSOTF was a grim, spartan camp in the doldrums, with an air of impermanence: mud everywhere, trashy food, and portable toilet and shower units. With the main operation on Basilan over, it was unclear what exactly the Special Operations task force was doing. The JSOTF was now smaller, but with proper walkways and creature comforts that spoke of a more hardened, permanent arrangement, evinced by the operation on Jolo that it was now overseeing, and the continued involvement of the U.S. military on Basilan and other islands.

I went next with Col. Linder for a visit to Basilan. In 2003 the island was peaceful and relatively safe following the U.S. military operation there, but without an economy and with an air of uncertainty.⁴ There had been legitimate questions as to whether the Americans and the government in Manila would stay engaged. Linder went from one venue to another on Basilan, from a Philippine army base to the local governor’s office to a charity organization, harping on the same themes as he had with me: about the importance of the American and Philippine militaries working together and with civilian aid agencies. It was a bit of a dog-and-pony show. This was especially apparent when under armed guard we visited Jollibies, a Filipino fast food chain that had recently opened a branch in the island capital of Isabella. As corny as this seemed—overwhelming force in order to eat fast food—it punctuated a point that the dog-and-pony show could not obscure: the air of uncertainty prevalent in 2003 was now less so, to a point where big business in Manila such as this restaurant chain felt safe enough to invest. Basilan now had cellphone towers, more asphalt roads and bridges, more schools, and higher agricultural production. Power outages occurred because of demand surges, a sign of uneven development, but of development nevertheless.

The Philippines, perhaps more than any other place in the world since 9/11, was a success for the American military. It wasn’t a dramatic or large-scale success, but something had happened that had a continuing upward curve. A significant and strategic island chain with a Muslim population, which had been outside the law and whose local bandits and insurgents were demonstrably linked to world terrorist organizations, was being reclaimed by a legitimate central government, a government that was, in turn, a U.S. ally and a democracy.

That democracy was not a healthy one. The Philippines remained coup-prone, though such a coup would not necessarily undermine progress in the remote Muslim south. In any case, reverses were still possible on all these islands, even though Abu Sayyaf seemed to be on its way back to the low-level banditry from which it had first emerged, before going big-time in the early 1990s with kidnappings and beheadings of Westerners. Nevertheless, progress against terrorists in the southern Philippines was surer than in Afghanistan or Iraq.

From the Philippines, after a short break back in the United States, I flew to Colombia, where the Army Special Forces mission that I had observed over three years ago was still in progress.

I had forgotten how beautiful Bogotá was, with its clean streets, smart cafés, stunningly dressed men and women, and bicycle lanes and ramps for the handicapped. Yet it was surreal, because the city also featured bomb sniffer dogs, constant searches by private security guards, and sprawling nearby slums. Colombia was three times the size of Iraq, with nearly double the population, and a geography so mountainous that it was like Afghanistan covered by jungle. But with only a few hundred American troops, including a significant Army Special Forces component, undeniable, measurable progress had also been made here.

The country was safer than in 2003. You could now drive from Bogotá to Medellin and Santa Marta. Three years before you couldn’t. Whereas road attacks on these heavily populated routes had been the norm, now they were rare and treated as unacceptable by the government. In 1999, there had been 3,500 kidnappings. That number had steadily dropped to 600.

In 2003 one Special Forces sergeant and warrant officer after another had told me that the most practical way to end the almost four-decade-long struggle against private drug armies was for the Colombian government to align itself with one group of thugs in order to defeat the other groups of thugs. And if such a strategy could alleviate the bloodshed and kidnappings, how was that not virtuous?⁵

In fact, the same week I arrived in Colombia in late April 2006, the Colombian government announced that the right-wing Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) was demobilizing, with the paramilitary group’s 30,000 members laying down their arms. Thus culminated a process that had begun with a ceasefire between the government and the AUC in 2002. No doubt it had led to many seamy deals, by which some members of the AUC were admitted to the government security services and others got assurances that they would not be prosecuted. “Think of it as a massive plea bargain,” one foreign observer told me. Nevertheless, rather than fight three private armies of narco-terrorists, the government now had to fight only two. Meanwhile, the left-wing Ejército de Liberacíon Nacional (ELN) was also on the ropes, leaving only the left-wing Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC)—by far the most formidable of the three—for the government to actively deal with. Because the FARC would not go down easily, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Vélez had little choice than to try to co-opt the other two. It wasn’t neat, it wasn’t pretty, and it was certainly slow-going, with reverses always possible, but it seemed the only plan that in the real world stood a chance of success. Said the same foreign observer, “You can’t set expectations here based on the moral standards of Vermont.”

Voters in Latin America’s oldest democracy agreed. Three weeks later they reelected President Uribe by a 62 percent plurality.

My first morning in Bogotá, I attended a meeting of U.S. and Colombian military and civilian officials at President Uribe’s offices. This was interagency coordination of not just one country but two. The subject was Chocó, the province abutting the border with Panama. The goal: how to prevent the FARC from moving into this barely governable jungle region that had recently been given up by the AUC. Social and educational services would be brought to bear, along with traveling judges—protected by the military—to adjudicate crimes. President Uribe did not want to repeat the mistake of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. Fujimori had rightly cracked down hard on the left-wing guerrillas of the Shining Path, but he never followed up with social programs in the areas he had liberated, so similar insurgencies later reemerged.

The U.S. soldiers and aid officials at this meeting not only all spoke Spanish, but also often communicated with one another in Spanish. It was impressive how immigration patterns in the United States had produced a cadre of area experts who understood a place like Colombia down to their fingertips. Every American officer and noncom I would meet in the coming days spoke Spanish, and many had Hispanic last names. I tried to imagine what Iraq and Afghanistan would be like with the same level of language expertise and input from our exotic immigrant communities.

Of course, progress was more easily made here. Although there were large, ungovernable spaces in Colombia, Colombian institutions existed on a much more sophisticated level than in the Middle East, let alone the countries whose governmental structures we were trying to create from scratch. Yet the U.S. military was making Colombian institutions work better still. For example, the Planning Assistance Training Team, a regular Army element out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, had arranged for every Colombian at this interagency meeting to have an assistant who would work in the same room with all the other assistants, thus creating a horizontal layer of interagency coordination among fourteen Colombian government ministries and departments that had not existed. If only it were that easy in Iraq—or Washington.

My time was short so rather than drive, I flew to Medellín. As everywhere in Colombia, the landscape was overpowering: an almost vertical, crinkled, and intricate junglescape the color of glistening black-green felt. This was the most active military region of Colombia, with hundreds of combat deaths and operations in the first three months of 2006 alone. When international drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel collapsed, following his killing at the hands of government security forces in 1993, the FARC, ELN, and AUC all emerged from the lower depths of the cocaine economy to fill the breach in this rich coca-growing region, which was relatively close to the cocaine corridor of Panama’s Darien Gap.

Now with the AUC disbanding and the ELN weakened, the Colombian Army was intensifying the pressure on the FARC in Medellín. The effort had begun three years before, when the army moved into a number of massive slum neighborhoods built on the scraggly mountains just outside the city, which in the mid-and late 1990s had become virtually extraterritorial crime kingdoms. Bunkers had stood atop ridgelines, and the entrances to the neighborhoods down below had been blocked by school buses so that government forces could not enter. Gun battles were constant as the various drug armies battled for control. “Express kidnappings” were also common, whereby if a ransom was not arranged within two hours the victim was executed.

Three years after the state had taken control of these neighborhoods, I spent the day in one of them: Comuna 13, formerly the worst slum of the cocaine capital of the world. Twelve-year-old girls were dressed like whores and the men looked like vagabonds in this claustrophobic maze of corrugated iron crawling up a forty-degree hillside. I observed a Colombian Army med-ready, the equivalent of a Green Beret MEDCAP. Doctors and dentists provided free medical care to people who had stood in line for hours. Neighborhood schoolchildren sang Colombia’s thumping national anthem. The area commander, Maj. Gen. Oscar Enrique Gonzáles Peña, told the crowd that the job of the military was to bring social services to the neighborhood, because that was the only way the state would keep control of these streets. Nearby were Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces Group with American flags on their uniforms. Of course, the reason crime statistics were way down was that soldiers patrolled the streets here regularly. As Maj. Gen. Gonzáles admitted to me, it would take several years more of continuous military operations to consolidate the government’s hold. Nevertheless, what the local army, with help from U.S. Army Special Forces, had achieved was still more than what had, by the spring of 2006, been achieved in Baghdad.

Though progress was slow, it was still progress, and as in the Philippines, the American flag on a camouflage uniform was associated with that.

The following day I went to southern Colombia to see another part of the country reclaimed from narco-terrorists. First I flew to Larandia, a Colombian military base that I had visited in February 2003 the day after one American private contractor was executed by the FARC and three others taken hostage. Their plane had gone down in guerrilla territory a few miles outside the base while it was in the midst of mapping coca fields for future eradication. In 2004 the Colombian military replaced an army division here with a combined joint task force advised by Americans, mainly 7th Group Green Berets. Though the three hostages still hadn’t been located, the task force had been successful in breaking up FARC concentrations for hundreds of miles around Larandia.

In particular, in April 2004, the government had taken control of Peñas Coloradas, a major cocaine-trafficking center to the south, close to the border with Ecuador. The journey to Peñas Coloradas in a Russian-built Colombian Army helicopter took forty minutes. As we flew south along the wide and looping, brown and mighty Caguán River, the jungle and grasslands became flatter and vaster, as well as emptier of any sign of human habitation. It might as well have been the Sahara north of Timbuktu. The difficulty of controlling this region by a government located several hundred miles and several mountain ranges away was written into the landscape, absent of asphalt and of all but the occasional dirt trail.

Suddenly the helicopter began a steep and circling combat descent to avoid the guns of FARC outposts. We dropped so fast it was as though the glittering greenery jumped up to grab you. The medieval-like arrangement of green sandbag walls with machine gun emplacements got larger and larger as we dove. The sandbag walls surrounded a shattered cluster of corrugated shacks by the Caguán River, which from the air looked like sludge, but now revealed itself as swift and turbulent.

The Alamo. Fort Apache. Choose a cliché. Peñas Coloradas was the real thing, a Colombian army post with two small battalions—four hundred soldiers—living amidst jungle and FARC guerrillas. Larandia, a less besieged base, was the nearest friendly place. Here had been a deserted gold rush town of sex, booze, and fast bucks. But instead of gold it was cocaine. So much money had poured through this place that the FARC counted it by simply weighing the stacks of $100 bills. Millions upon millions of dollars of coke profits piled up here, yet no infrastructure had ever been built save for the streets of scrap-iron and cinder-block shacks that were now completely deserted. It was the ultimate false economy, which, nevertheless, had proved difficult to defeat. A sign in the makeshift bull ring read: “Coca—the Alternative to Peace.”

I saw other ratty signs: “Gym,” “Cosmetics,” “Restaurant.” Family pictures still hung on walls and children’s toys littered the floors, as the whole town had cleared out in a hurry when the FARC ordered a retreat of every family into the jungle. I was haunted by a very personal, human sadness, even if generations here had been exploited and brutalized by the FARC, and even if the takeover by the Colombian Army had been, in a larger sense, the right thing to do. You simply couldn’t wander through these haunted shacks without being affected by the turned-upside-down lives.

Across the smoky river was a compound of two large sheet-metal houses, formerly the home of Nayibe Rojas Valderama, alias “Sonia,” one of the FARC’s leading cocaine traffickers, who in 2005 had been extradited to the United States and was now in an American prison. The national army was currently in partial control of these cocaine badlands. It seemed to have inherited a void populated by snakes and insects.

The last place I visited in Colombia was Arauca. In February 2003, when I had last been there, Arauca Province was considered the most dangerous region of the country. Narco-terrorist attacks with IEDs, cylinder bombs, and car bombs occurred not every few days, but every few hours. Before the U.S. military began to cope with IEDs in Iraq, 7th Special Forces Group was coping with them in Arauca. Green Berets had left the base only in full battle-rattle. The town of Arauca, on the muddy Arauca River, which marked the border with Venezuela, had been a ratty sprawl of tacky storefronts and café awnings made of black plastic, the kind used for garbage bags. Attacks on the pipeline carrying Colombian oil from here to the Caribbean coast were constant.

To say that there had been dramatic change since then would be a serious understatement. Proper cafés were now open, storefronts painted, crowds flooded the streets—at night too. Rather than a rathole, Arauca looked like a normally poor and unsophisticated provincial town. Three years ago I journeyed through these streets inside a convoy of Humvees armed with light-medium machine guns. Now I rode in the open back of a pickup truck with a handful of American and Colombian soldiers, armed with nothing more substantial than Beretta pistols, and motorcycle escorts with a few assault rifles. Three years ago I did not leave the Humvee in the middle of town. Now I got out and walked the streets with Army Capt. Troy Terrebonne of Houston, who told me, “Wherever you want to go, we can go, on foot. It’s safe here.”

The last IED attack in the town had been eighteen months ago. In the whole province, there had not been one attack on the pipeline, and only two car bombs and two fatal IEDs over the previous seven months. Instead of two functioning police stations in the province, there were now eight.

There had been no magic bullet solution here, no new twist, no newsworthy technique that you could write about. It was just bread-and-butter, never-give-up attrition of the same. The Green Berets had provided small-unit training that raised the combat quality of the Colombian Army, making it more aggressive in hunting down the ELN and the FARC, as well as making it more aware of human rights as a pivotal tool in a counterinsurgency. Meanwhile, the funds appropriated by the State Department had come with an implicit proviso: the national army would put much more emphasis on medical, educational, and social programs to secure the goodwill of the inhabitants. The goal was simple: the narco-terrorists should have more to fear from the national army than the local population should have to fear from the narco-terrorists, while the national army would be seen by the locals as friends rather than just as another group of thugs with guns.

Meanwhile, independent prosecutors were brought in from Bogotá, who, because they did not live here, could not be intimidated. Development aid was distributed from the capital, where there was much less chance that it could be stolen than if it had been controlled by local officials. Money from local oil revenues was less and less being diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials, and had become the main revenue source to fund construction.

There was still work to be done. The ELN was in disarray, but the FARC was trying to move into this former ELN stronghold. President Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government across the river was still providing a rear base for the FARC and ELN. More generally, despite all the specific instances of progress I had seen, cocaine was still flowing into the United States at prices not much different than three years before. “We’re moving slowly forward,” an American official admitted, “and ‘slowly’ is not a word that the U.S. Congress and the American public like very much.”

Between risk-prone invasions like Iraq on one hand and isolationism on the other hand, there were the low-cost, low-risk, tediously unspectacular options of Colombia and the Philippines, of which Mali, Georgia, and other places were variations in a minor key. Particularly in the cases of Capt. Torrey in Timbuktu, who wanted “to set the conditions that will prevent the emergence” of terrorist activities, and Col. Jim Linder in Jolo, who said, “I will build my fortress on deeds,” here was the Global War on Terrorism as preventative rather than as proscriptive, more productive than Operation Anaconda or First Fallujah. If there was another model out there that would keep the American military engaged without being over-extended, and that would help move along the interagency process, I hadn’t seen it.

As I had been seeing on several continents for four years, the overwhelming majority of our deployments are generally not bellicose, not utopian, not a distortion of our values and, to the contrary, are the epitome of half measures: full of compromises with the host nation, as well as recognition on a daily basis of our own limitations. The host nations in question have been overwhelmingly democratic, and have evolved as such over the years, rather than have us impose systems upon them. In many (if not most) cases, these nations have specifically requested our assistance. Imperfect and pathetic though they might often be, not to assist such democracies would be irresponsible, given our resources and historic responsibilities as a great power.

Such a hidden, responsible hand was very much in evidence in eastern Europe in the 1990s, in the form of military training missions, conducted primarily by the United States, that were similar to those I observed in the developing world. Such missions helped ease the path of former Warsaw Pact satellites toward democracy. The partial Westernization of the militaries of Poland, Romania, and others was crucial to their political reformation.

The threat of anarchy in parts of the world was broadly acknowledged, but so were the vast expense and uncertainty associated with nation-building. Therefore, was there anything more morally prudent and cost-effective than crisis prevention? Crisis prevention had many facets, and the deployments I had been following represented a military aspect of it.

The subtlety of all these missions has been evinced by the near absence of news coverage about them, even though none of them had been secret. As for some of the more high-cost deployments we conducted, such as sailing carrier strike groups through choke points like the Strait of Malacca, where would international trade and globalization be if the U.S. Navy suddenly ceased such activities? To define these missions by their imperfections, or to lump everything together with Iraq, was to tempt isolationism.

I understood and respected the impulse of those who, because of our troubles in Iraq—and the strain Iraq was putting on the armed services—wanted to reassess our commitments worldwide. But there was a danger in taking that idea too far. As Bill Torrey, the West Pointer, told me in Mali, “I really believe that most of the places where we’re deployed, we leave better off.”

Before leaving Arauca, I paid a visit to the SF hootch where I had stayed in 2003, populated at the time by several dozen Green Berets. Now there were fewer than half a dozen American troops here. The place seemed haunted. The reason was not that Green Berets were no longer needed; rather, it had to do with the manpower strain imposed by Iraq and Afghanistan.

It wasn’t only Colombia that was suffering because of the demand for high troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. In many places I had been—Algeria, Thailand, the Philippines—troops and equipment were missing because the other area commands were being sucked dry by the ongoing wars in the Middle East. Yet, in all these same places, the individual soldiers themselves had used their ingenuity to overcome many of the difficulties. As for the 7th Special Forces Group, which in the first years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had been confined mainly to Latin America, causing frustration and morale problems, the diversion of personnel and resources to the Middle East was actually welcomed. As one Green Beret after another told me, “Now more of us can finally get in on the fight.”