Read Online Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge - Free Book Online Page B

And Hillen’s second thought as the phone conversation unfolded was that everything that he had accomplished thus far during his tenure had been done outside the traditional budget authority of the State Department. For instance, Hillen had helped push through the Section 1206 program, also known as “Global Train and Equip.” Foreign military assistance—providing equipment and technical support to foreign militaries—was traditionally overseen by the State Department, but Section 1206 of the Fiscal Year 2006 defense budget gave the Defense Department authority to do the job (referred to as “building the military capacity of partner nations”). For instance, Section 1206 funds helped Pakistan acquire helicopters, spare parts, and night-vision equipment so it could combat Islamic militants in its tribal areas and do it quickly. To critics it represented the steady erosion of the State Department’s traditional diplomatic activities and the accumulation of even more power by the Defense Department. But the military liked Section 1206 funding. It was faster and easier than the traditional security assistance programs that required a lot of cumbersome oversight and took years to execute. Section 1207 authority, another new mechanism, allowed the secretary of defense to transfer funds to the State Department so they could provide civilian stabilization and reconstruction assistance. Those funds were used to train local police capacity in Haiti’s Cité Soleil and clear unexploded ordnance in Lebanon. In Colombia, the State Department and the Pentagon used Section 1207 to fund health and education programs in areas recently won back from guerrillas. 9
    In essence, Sections 1206 and 1207 quietly expanded the foreign policy powers of the Pentagon under the banner of “interagency cooperation.” But Hillen had pushed for it, along with his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As a former soldier, he was the ideal advocate for pushing what was essentially a military agenda, raising consciousness within the larger civilian bureaucracy about “their” role in counterinsurgency. It would require a plan of action, training, and—most important—money. Petraeus promised to help come up with the funds for the conference, and he brought in Jeb Nadaner, deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations, as cosponsor. Hillen was energized, and he started work on organizing the conference.
    The conference, Hillen told me, was “the first step” toward creating a new consensus in Washington, a push to reorganize the foreign policy apparatus around the tasks of nation building. It succeeded in recasting the conversation about national security, and the mission of the twenty-first-century diplomatic service. “That’s the basic genesis: a phone call from Petraeus to me at my desk, and a willingness to just jump out there and try this,” Hillen said.
    Within Washington, however, Hillen ran into bureaucratic resistance in his attempt to build a “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency approach. For one, he faced questions from the National Security Council, which in theory was supposed to coordinate the “interagency” issues that cut across government departments. Not long after he started organizing, Hillen received a call from the NSC; his efforts had prompted “a lot of concern” about a potential bureaucratic land grab by the military. Part of the problem was conceptual: Since September 11, 2001, U.S. foreign policy had been reorganized around the response to terrorism, not insurgency. The State Department had a counterterrorism office that was focused on a much narrower set of problems: tracking, finding, and combatting transnational Islamic terror groups. The counterinsurgents were talking about something bigger. They were framing the problem in terms of nation building. And the set of tools they wanted to develop