The John Paul Vann of Afghanistan Speaks

In the book The Operators by Michael Hastings, there is a quote from Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall comparing General Stan McChrystal to John Paul Vann. John Paul Vann was a former army officer who went to Vietnam as a soldier and stayed on working as a Provincial Aid Advisor. He was famous for his ability to drive around and live in contested districts (alone) and was a tireless advocate for the Vietnamese people. He was also a compulsive womanizer, an alcoholic, and a shameless self-promoter. Remove those negative traits, and replace them with a typical all-American Midwest kid raised in a stable two-parent household where he developed a strong sense of commitment, a bias for action, and the ability to thrive while taking calculated risks. You have Chris Corsten. He was the John Paul Vann of Afghanistan

Our two-decade-long involvement in Afghanistan has been a fiasco. Every aspect of our performance had major issues, none more so than the herculean efforts at rebuilding and rehabilitating the war-torn infrastructure. Yet buried deep inside the legacy of failure are stories of remarkable success. Carter Malkasain described one example of competent development leading directly to local prosperity (briefly) in the book The War Comes to Garmser.

Another example has just been published by my friend Chris Corsten, detailing his decade in Afghanistan as a soldier and a heavily armed humanitarian. The book is 3000 Days in Afghanistan, but I need to reveal something you will not glean from Chris’s writing. In the world of outside the wire contractors, men (and a few women) who worked in contested districts infested with Taliban, who lived in local compounds, drove local cars, rarely spoke English outside their compound, wore local clothes, and lived off the local economy to deliver massive aid projects on time and budget, Chris Corsten was the GOAT

Chris stayed the longest, had the most impact, and did, by orders of magnitude, the most projects. He was also a shura ninja when it came to working through problems with tribal elders. Chris Corsten is a legend—to those of us who knew what he accomplished and also to thousands of Afghans who became self-sufficient as hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland became productive again thanks to his irrigation programs.

The book is a clear reflection of Chris, and if you know him, the two personality traits that stand out are conscientiousness and integrity. Those two traits were combined with an attitude that was the common denominator among us working outside the wire: zero tolerance for wasted efforts, making work stupid, and excuses. Add to this mix the fact that Chris is a modest man who is not prone to exaggeration, routinely attributes all success to his subordinates, and loathes the idea of self-promotion. You have a writer who will lay out the facts. He does this in an almost businesslike manner.

As you get to the end of this remarkable story, Chris lists the spectacular amount of work accomplished during the 2010-2011 surge, and if you know what was going on in Afghanistan, it is easy to get confused. It seems impossible that Expats (mostly American, British, South African, and Australian) were living and working in local Afghan communities while supervising massive irrigation projects in districts where the military was sustaining casualties on a regular basis.

If you aren’t familiar with Afghanistan, you might read about Chris’s accomplishments without fully grasping their significance. In 2010, provinces such as Khost, Kandahar, Paktia, Kunar, Helmand, Farah, Nangarhar, and Herat faced challenging situations. Therefore, it is difficult to appreciate his achievement of completing every project he started, especially while being supervised by expatriates who were actively working in areas contested by the Taliban on a daily basis.

Chris and his crew demonstrated that aid can be effectively delivered in contested areas. Still, it must be carried out by knowledgeable individuals who have a personal stake in the situation. In Afghanistan, it was also essential for them to be armed.

Let me explain the situation regarding weapons. Our approach was based on the principle that if you can’t ensure safety, it will be difficult to survive. The threats facing outside contractors came in various forms. The most significant risk was kidnapping, while another major concern was the need to store, transport, and distribute large amounts of cash. You are not safe living in a local Afghan compound that holds a safe containing over a million dollars in cash. Similarly, you are not safe when you go to the local branch of the Kabul Bank to withdraw $700,000 for your monthly project payroll. It’s crucial to know how to convert $700,000 in U.S. dollars into smaller denominations of Afghan currency.

Not all of us carried firearms either – Jeff “Raybo” Radan, a former Marine infantry officer and Ranger School graduate (thus the Raybo call sign), worked a year in Helmand and never carried a weapon. He did projects in contested towns like Now Zad, but being a former Marine, he knew how to get a ride on Marine air and thus was able to travel safely. But most of us were armed, and all of us had weapons, including belt-fed machine guns (in some provinces), inside our living compounds. Our armed authority came from the Provincial governors, and if we ever used our weapons, we were accountable to them as well as the US Embassy.

Chris explains why former, experienced military men, who have already acquired knowledge of local atmospherics and a solid understanding of local culture, are the best option for staffing aid programs in conflict zones. All the men mentioned in Chris’s book (he uses assumed names) were prior military, and all of us had years on the ground before we were able to transition into what I term “Free Range” contracting.

3000 Days in Afghanistan should be required reading at both US AID and the Department of State as they sift through 20 years of lessons learned in Afghanistan. This week a senior USAID executive, who had extensive Afghanistan time, released a paper titled USAID Afghanistan: What Have We Learned. He concludes his assessment with four lessons;

1. Do not try to do everything
2. Stick to proven development principles
3. Flexibility and adaptability are key, and
4. Expect and plan for high levels of oversight.

Chris details all four of these lessons as he explains how he avoided graft, corruption, and shakedowns from security services. He also discusses how he effectively addressed theft and delivered meaningful aid by injecting cash directly into local economies. An unexpected benefit we discovered early in the program was the ability to take the Taliban off the battlefield by offering a couple of months of hard labor in exchange for a decent wage.

Chris threw no stones as he explained what we were doing and why we felt we should do more. He describes his disappointment at not getting traction with USAID and the State Department and then moves on. The program he was running got plenty of attention in the press at the time. There were NPR radio interviews, 60-minute segments, and multiple magazine articles, including this classic account in the Toronto Star about our team in Kandahar. The FRI blog was booming back then as I documented our massive infrastructure projects in Nimroz province. In the end, none of that mattered; it turns out that being successful where everyone else is failing can be problematic.

As William Hammink admits in his review of USAID in Afghanistan, we threw too much money into a country that could not absorb it. What is now obvious is that Chris Cortsen showed USAID exactly how to do Afghanistan aid. Spend a few years and a few million dollars to get all the irrigation systems back up and running, build a few schools, pave a few roads, bring in engineers with some commercial demo to blast rock, and build runways in remote mountain-top towns. You have done about all that should be done to get the country heading towards self-sufficiency.  Then you can leave.

3000 Days in Afghanistan is an easy-to-read account about a remarkable individual who sticks to the facts to make a compelling case for how sustainable development in conflict zones should be implemented. Buried behind the facts and the business-like narrative are the stories that someday will emerge from this program as historians start to comb through the records in search of what really happened in Afghanistan. They will find plenty about Chris, hopefully telling his story in rich detail. There is a lot to be said, and although Chris may not be seeking recognition for what he has accomplished, he certainly has earned it.