Bureaucratic Politics,Role Conflict,and the Internal Dynamics of US Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan

Introduction

Afghanistan was the first major test for state building in the twenty-first century and embroiled the United States and its allies for over a decade. As their forces withdraw, or transition, ¹ the venture can be evaluated with some benefit of hindsight. Given the expenditure of the international community, which by 2012 had reached US$100 billion, the achievement of the state building project was underwhelming. The drug trade accounts for over half of gross domestic product. Hunger is widespread and most children under five years of age are malnourished. It is now widely accepted that the strength of cultural, religious, and political traditions was underestimated. ² Corruption continues to define politics at national, provincial, and local levels. Afghanistan sits at the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index and the Human Development Index ranks it at 175 of the 187 countries. ³

Yet there were some successes. US Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) sunk hundreds of wells and constructed many health clinics. 2.5 million Afghan children enrolled in schools, built with the help of PRTs, across the country. Children receiving some sort of tutelage increased from 900,000 to seven million. Death rates among adult males halved and access to clean water has helped to curb disease and improve life expectancy. ⁴ These outcomes are indicative of what the US/Allied effort more broadly and the PRTs in particular were capable of. However, positive developments of this kind were outweighed by negatives, during the Bush era, which this article mainly focuses on, and the succeeding administrations of Barack Obama.

We attempt to explain why and employ a synthesis of role theory and bureaucratic politics approaches to do so. Role theory is readily situated if not already embedded in the bureaucratic politics paradigm ⁵ and both are reinvigorated by their application to an analysis of PRTs in Afghanistan. Although PRTs were mandated to instigate a whole-of-government strategy at ground level, its proponents misjudged the formidable barriers to cooperation and innovation that are imposed by bureaucracy. The role conceptions of individual agencies were often incompatible and hindered the PRTs from functioning as unitary vessels for implementing national objectives. We draw on interviews with senior US officials and civilian and military PRT personnel, government documentation, nongovernmental organization reports, congressional committee hearings, media sources, and engage with existing scholarship to illuminate how new and varied expectations generated interagency role conflict within PRTs and was indicative of a more general coordination problem.

This article first identifies role theory and derives a concept of role conflict from it. It then outlines the susceptibility of PRTs as an arena for role conflict to manifest. We then evaluate military and civilian components of the PRT program and find that superordinate goals were adversely affected by the military’s dominance and the disorder that afflicted the civilian contingent. Finally, presidential leadership and interagency training are suggested as means to mitigate role conflict and improve overall performance.

Role Theory, Role Conflict, and Bureaucratic Politics

Role theory emerged from social psychology, sociology, and anthropology. ⁶ It is concerned with the formation and development of understandings that people have about themselves and their place in society and the behaviors that result in social settings. These settings could include families or clubs or positions in organizations or offices in public life. Most individuals fulfil most of the societal expectations about a “role” they perceive as ascribed or assigned to them. Some will reject or rebel against prescribed roles or certain expectations associated with them. In political science and International Relations, role theory has focused on the national role conceptions of policy and decision makers as determinants of state behavior. These conceptions combine strategic assessments and normative considerations about a state’s posture and actions in the world. ⁷ Foreign policy is the subfield in which role theory has been most prominently applied. Here primarily concentrated on elite deliberations, role theory implicitly and sometimes explicitly acknowledges the influence of a broader society, history, and culture on the choices made by political decision makers. ⁸

The concept of role conflict derives from role theory. In International Relations, it has been framed as tension between a state’s “domestically defined national role conceptions” and its “externally defined role expectations.” This simple inside–outside dichotomy parallels an everyday understanding of what occurs when individuals or other entities are torn between two or more roles entailing contradictory sets of demands. That is, a binary distinction or dilemma. A different form of role conflict emerges from the multiple inputs of different substate institutions or agencies, each influenced by their own organizational cultures and many national and international factors. This can stimulate discordant ideas and generate policy dysfunction and instability. Although it is generally accepted that consensus between all participants in policy processes is hardly inevitable, ⁹ Cantir and Kaarbo contend that some role theorists have “black-boxed” the state as a cohesive entity. ¹⁰ Elsewhere these authors expand on how “roles played by states on the international stage are contested by domestic political agents.” In Denmark and the Netherlands, internal dispute affected government approaches to crises in Iraq and Afghanistan. Political actors did not conform to any common understanding of the national interest and contestation about the national role impacted upon the process and outcome of foreign policy. ¹¹

The identities, perceptions, interests, and cultures of substate agencies and the personnel that inhabit them shape conceptions of their roles. ¹² The multiplicity of agencies with different roles promotes variable conceptions of the same issue. Ensuing disagreement, and even serious discord, challenge assertions that “the United States” will choose a course of action to realize its foreign policy goals “most efficiently and economically.” ¹³ This role conflict concept complements the bureaucratic politics paradigm. Graham Allison’s “Model II” contends that “the actor is not a monolithic ‘nation’ or ‘government,’ but rather a constellation of loosely allied organizations on top of which government leaders sit.” ¹⁴ His Model III, which some analysts regard as consonant with if not an extension of Model II, posits that individuals with influence on the shaping of foreign policy are neither a monolithic group, nor merely an emblem of the agencies that they represent. ¹⁵ Above all, what these two models demonstrate is that foreign policy is less a reflection of deliberate choices than the outcome of compromise and secondary preferences. Scholars such as Cantir and Kaarbo, Marsh, and Michaud, reiterate Allison’s contention that “pulling and hauling” between agents determines foreign policy. They also affirm the overlap between bureaucratic politics’ and role conflict models. Others emphasize that state structure does not generate inevitable patterns of action. ¹⁶

We argue that a fusion of role conflict and bureaucratic politics approaches can help elucidate the performance of US PRTs in Afghanistan. As documentation including Quadrennial Defense Reviews, the State Department’s Transformational Diplomacy Initiative and United States Agency for International Development (USAID’s) Fragile State Strategy encapsulated, the overarching goals of the mission were to promote security, economic development, and democracy. Backed by military operations, substantial progress in these areas would emasculate the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. What transpired, however, was disaggregation of a nominal ideal agency-wide understanding of the national purpose into several practically incompatible conceptions predominating within disparate agency silos. Although these roles may each have been conceived, comprehended, and pursued with some degree of competence, a paradoxical consequence is that they often manifested as a suboptimal and at worst dysfunctional whole. This can happen when different role conceptions promote incongruous interpretations of how to reach an ultimate goal. Author interviews reveal that there was no clear route mapped out to meet core objectives. Instead, US officials were guided by the behavioral norms of their respective agencies.

Dov Zakheim, the Under Secretary of Defense 2001–2004, compartmentalized the intra-government divisions declaring “we were fighting these wars with two and a half agencies; the Defense Department, there is a chunk of the State Department, a chunk of USAID and a chunk of everybody else. But our government as a whole was certainly not functional.” ¹⁷ Commander of the Combined US Forces 2003–2005, General David Barno, described similar experiences. He argued that in Washington there was no common understanding of the mission or concrete objectives that reliably transcended agency interests; that is, no agreed path to realizing the “national interest.” Michael Miklaucic, the USAID representative on the Civilian Response Corps Inter-Agency Task Force 2003–2008, impressed that it was almost impossible to get the full array of agencies behind a set of goals and synchronize schedules. James Dobbins, the US Special Representative to Afghanistan in 2001 and 2013, informed that the US bureaucracy became dysfunctional because there was “too much overlap among competing fiefdoms.” The government was unable to define or articulate a national strategy. ¹⁸ Despite these problems, PRTs were considered to be a ground-level solution that could overcome the gap between diverse bureaucratic conceptions and the overarching expectations of the mission.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Their Vulnerability to Role Conflict

Following the fall of the Taliban regime, the United States created Coalition Humanitarian Liaison Cells, consisting of five to twelve soldiers who engaged in small-scale state-building activity. Some early success encouraged the expansion of these teams into PRTs, which represented a nimbler alternative to an international force presence outside Kabul. In December 2002, the first PRT was deployed and by the end of the 2008, twelve US-led PRTs, mandated to promote security, reconstruction, and good governance, were operating. PRTs implemented quick impact projects in areas of business, agriculture, public health, and infrastructure. They aimed to win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan populace, years before the trumpeted shift to such a strategy occurred under General Stanley McChrystal. ¹⁹ PRT commanders, usually a colonel or lieutenant colonel, were responsible for security and interagency coordination and received policy guidance from an Executive Steering Committee based in Kabul. The Department of Agriculture (DoA), the USAID, and the Department of State (DoS) were the leading civilian contributors. Their personnel were to serve as agricultural advisors, developmental experts, and political liaisons with local governments. ²⁰

As this diverse membership and array of responsibilities suggests, PRTs were constructed to enable a whole-of-government strategy in the field. It was hoped that they would facilitate interagency cooperation and common positions on the challenges presented. Prima facie, they had the capacity to negotiate differences and were soon acclaimed as a pioneering approach that harmonized goals and mission objectives. Condeleezza Rice called them “a model of civil–military relations for the future.” Others argued that PRTs represented “a unique and successful solution” to Afghanistan’s many problems, fulfilling important tasks such as school building, election support, security, reconstruction, community empowerment, disarmament, and mediation. A 2009 report by the Department of Defence (DoD) claimed that PRTs combined key features of US national power in support of state building, while a USAID report declared the program “an effective tool for stabilization in Afghanistan.” ²¹

Yet interagency cohesion did not come as fast and easy as these accounts imply. PRTs attempted to modify the bureaucracy to facilitate new role expectations, but these competed with prevailing role conceptions that were deeply embedded. The latter are associated with formal institutions and have well-defined and detailed guides to actions, while the former are linked more to informal goals and objectives that place no substantive constraints on behavior. ²² PRT members were subjected to contending priorities. On one hand, they had an interest in prosecuting a whole-of-government strategy in accordance with the program’s generalized purpose and expectations. On the other hand, each agency brought its own role conceptions, which served as functional and normative bases for their actions as part of these composite creations. For some personnel, tension between agency role conceptions was exacerbated by instances of a more basic role conflict, when two institutional masters simultaneously made contradictory demands on them. PRTs were a staging ground for this eventuality.

The US Military

Military institutions have national role conceptions that set them apart from the rest of the government sector. Their individual histories and organizational cultures impress certain ideas upon their personnel, prescribing goals and action, and making other ideas and policy options “implausible or even unthinkable.” ²³ Military doctrine was a more potent influence on the behavior of soldiers within PRTs than expectations of collaboration with other agencies. As PRTs were predominantly staffed by soldiers, most remained rigid, combat-minded units that adhered to the operational paradigm and lexicon of the military. Some considered this beneficial. In a conflict-ridden environment the ability to call upon “over-the-horizon firepower through the use of close air support and quick reaction forces” was “used to good effect.” ²⁴ On balance, however, the pervasiveness of military mentalities had a detrimental impact on the PRT program.

In Afghanistan, the military’s preference was “to prepare for major combat,” Dobbins argues, “and not to disperse their efforts in stability operations, which were regarded as of secondary importance and something that detracted from their primary mission.” ²⁵ Military nomenclature and strategy married the PRT program to combat operations, and thus implanted it within the framework of counterinsurgency, the overarching objective of which was to roll back the Taliban. For the US military, PRTs were simply another method or tool of warfare, albeit with a new twist, rather than an authentic attempt to reconstruct Afghanistan and assist its peoples. The Pentagon’s Directive 3000.05 exemplified the pervasiveness of the counterinsurgency drive. According to the Directive, implemented in November 2005, the military was mandated to fill gaps in capacity on the civilian side. The Directive indicated that the Pentagon had “a doctrinal requirement to provide any skill sets required for reconstruction and stabilization that are not currently present in civilian agencies.” ²⁶ The resources and capacity of the US military meant that it had more power, both in Washington and in the field, than any other actor. During a 2008 congressional hearing on Afghanistan, Ambassador Karl Inderfurth, the Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, described the imbalance between the military and civilian realms as the “Popeye syndrome”: the strong right arm, the military, is fuelled by spinach and overpowers the ‘anemic left arm’ of the civilian agencies. ²⁷

The first problem with the role conception that military personnel brought to the PRTs was the prioritization of security to an extent that far exceeded any accorded to the Afghan populace or to development projects. Hafvenstein recalled that soldiers from the PRT in Helmand “spent their time behind their formidable walls and barbed wire moat on the outskirts of Lashkaragah.” On the rare occasions they did leave their base “it was in full body armour, riding Humvees with gun turrets.” In another instance, involving a meeting with local Afghan authority figures, the State Department’s PRT representative was accompanied by a group of sixteen soldiers in heavily armored vehicles. Such a hostile party hardly conveyed a favorable impression to skeptical tribal authorities with a history of animosity toward foreigners. In battleground regions, Special Forces operated out of PRT compounds, which they used as holding grounds for suspected terrorists or places to interrogate prisoners. ²⁸

The military’s role conception also adversely affected the implementation of reconstruction projects. Due to the resources at its disposal, the military was in charge of planning and executing most PRT ventures. But its command apparatus was not ideal for that purpose. PRTs reported directly to military task forces, which would then report to regional and central commands. They received instructions from brigade headquarters and the PRT commander dispersed funds. These were readily available through the Commanders Emergency Response Program enabling them to approve up to US$25,000 “for the rapid implementation of small-scale projects, such as providing latrines for a school or a generator for a hospital.” ²⁹ The reasoning behind this was that soldiers’ knowledge would be invaluable. From a developmental standpoint, however, it was problematic that funds were used without consulting the civilian agency members, who had more experience and expertise in these areas than their military counterparts. ³⁰ A senior military officer contrasted the military’s objectives with those of USAID:

In almost every PRT, there is this friction that develops between folks from USAID who want to go into the big projects, fix things for the long term, while the unit commanders are looking for things that can create conditions that provide immediate results. ³¹

Some still lauded PRTs as a model for collaboration. But in Afghanistan civilians were not able to obtain independent funds until 2004. Even after that, the military retained control over most resources and man power. The composition of PRT’s confirms that they were essentially a creature of the military reflecting its preferences rather than an authentic fusion of governmental agencies. On average, only two civilian representatives were ensconced in a PRT at any time. At most, there were three or four. By 2009, there were 1,021 military personnel in PRTs compared with 34 from the civilian agencies combined. ³⁴ This equated to one civilian for every 30 military personnel. Ronald Neumann, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, lamented the asymmetry noting “there was only one USAID officer in each PRT with very little project money and with no local staff.” ³⁵ Frictions were exacerbated by PRTs being answerable to several hierarchies. A survey on the experiences of officials from the DoA found that this prevented some from fulfilling their nominal role as agronomic advisors. ³⁶

In Washington, competing agency-based role conceptions adversely affected the PRTs. “There was a great deal of bitterness between people at Defense and people at State,” recalled Joseph Collins, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations 2001–2004. ³⁷ On visits to the US capital, Barno found the “blame game” between Defense and State at its most severe. “The war,” he informed, “seemed to be between Defense and State and not the US and the Taliban. The bureaucratic turf battles back in Washington were tangible, they were extraordinary.” ³⁸ Collins said that from the beginning there was “tremendous tension” between USAID and the military. ³⁹ Neumann conveyed that there was a gulf between the understandings and preferences of the State Department and those of the military establishment:

The military criticizes the civilians for being too slow to move, too inclined to observe, and the civilians criticize the military for rushing forward with bad ideas. We teach quality military officers to try and get what they need, to go forward with what they’ve got usually in a fairly short term perspective. Civilians, whether AID or State, are working in a world where a great many of the issues they handle are never going to be solved. So you spend a lot of your time trying to keep things from getting worse, trying to understand the political culture. ⁴⁰

Some officials were more aware of that consideration. Barno, for example, acknowledged that PRTs were a “hugely important” program with “symbolic and practical” significance. They required unique military personnel to engage in interagency cooperation that pooled expertise. According to William Taylor, Coordinator of US Government and International Assistance to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, PRTs could “marry the military and security aspects with the civilian and development aspects.” At the ground level, a lieutenant experienced a quality interagency program. Another recognized PRTs as the “cutting edge of military transformation.” Approaches like these may have helped PRT Gardez to implement beneficial economic and social projects and PRT Bamiyan to reconstruct a university. ⁴⁴

Military role conceptions had a dramatic impact on interagency relations. Some projects, overseen by more adaptable officers who understood the new expectations, were successful. But for the most part warfighting, procedure based on doctrine, and other aspects of military culture were incompatible with the PRTs’ whole-of-government mandate. PRTs failed to adequately incorporate civilian agencies, as this required military personnel to simultaneously fulfil varying conceptions and expectations “which logically call for opposing behaviors.” ⁴⁵ Thus, when the military were faced with inconsistent and contradictory ideas of how they should act, embedded role conceptions usually persevered and “the autonomous logic of military power” ⁴⁶ dominated. This was a microcosm of the broader US experience in Afghanistan. The military subordinated infrastructure development, counter narcotics, and legal reform to the exigencies of war fighting. Other initiatives such as the Agribusiness Development Teams, and the military’s Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army training programs, diverged from the rest of the government. Each infused state-building activities with military role conceptions.

Civilian Agencies

The pervasive influence of the military’s role conceptions not only widened the cleavage between civilian and military branches but also exposed discord in the civilian realm. Here also role conflict instigated coordination problems between DoS, USAID, and DoA members. Civilians were beholden to the DoS Regional Bureau and the Director of Foreign Assistance, who, confusingly, was also the Administrator of USAID in Kabul. Moreover, this ambiguous “system” underplayed the State Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stability, an office that had been created to mediate relations between agencies. Instead, each agency pursued its own myopic strategy and officials reported separately to their superiors at the US embassy. ⁴⁷ In Washington, competing charts on how best to organize the PRTs emerged from the three civilian agencies. Consequently, the civilian element of Afghanistan’s PRTs manifested as an incoherent assortment of diplomats, political advisors, development advocates, and agricultural experts. Deployment was approached arbitrarily and did not reflect the expectations of the PRTs, each of which operated in regions that presented unique challenges. In some instances, civilian PRT members had no conception of the expertise possessed outside their agency. An official stationed at the Parwan PRT said he had been given no operational instructions: “Nobody really gave me any guidance,” he remembered. “I was just basically cut loose and told, ‘Okay, you’re at the PRT’ and that was about it. Nobody told me anything. I had no idea of my function, or what my role was going to be.” Another despaired that his PRT was akin to a “Sunday pick up team” rather than a cohesive unit. ⁴⁸ According to the US Committee on Armed Services, there was “no clear definition of the PRT mission, no concept of operations or doctrine, no standard operating procedures.” The committee uncovered disjointed and unclear chains of command between civilian agencies that received direction from multiple sources. ⁴⁹ The separate approaches of civilian agencies, therefore, encouraged role conflict that compromised the integrated whole-of-government mandate and left many of the members bereft of a purpose beyond promoting their agencies’ functional preferences and behavioral norms. ⁵⁰

Coordination problems were entwined with personnel issues. From 2007 until mid-2008, the number of civilian officials serving in PRTs increased by four and at the end of 2008 USAID had fewer personnel in Afghanistan PRTs than was authorized. Although there were nominally at least two USAID officials in each PRT, due to an inefficient rotation system there was sometimes only one or none. ⁵¹ Meagre civilian man power circumscribed the PRTs’ capacities. Barno acknowledged that they “were limited by the availability of US government civilians.” He attributed this to the differing role conceptions of the DoS, USAID, and the DoA where there was “a tremendous tug of war to get those civilians out there and then keep the pipeline filled with those people and not have gas as time went on.” For Barno, the discord produced by different civilian authorities was “much more difficult to overcome” than within the military sphere. He characterized the State Department’s approach to Afghanistan as “akin to punching an adversary with five outstretched fingers rather than one powerful closed fist.” ⁵² Zakheim remembers that the military resented the fact that, in the absence of civilian capacity, it was the default option for “just about everything:”

Because the only guys that carried the guns were the military guys, they were the guys upon whom everybody depended. There was uneasiness between the military folks who were bearing the overwhelming brunt of the Afghan mission, and everybody else who was clearly not doing the same. ⁵³

Funding was another conduit for role conflict. In comparison to the military, USAID struggled to obtain funding, partly due to poor communication within its skeletal staff structure. USAID’s people lamented delays and that they had little authority when it came to decision-making. According to Michelle Parker, a former PRT representative, commanders used “funds to initiate projects, because they could obligate those funds quickly, while USAID would go through normal budget processes.” ⁵⁹ Everything had to first be approved by the mission headquarters in Kabul and then Washington. One official posted to a PRT said that during his deployment “not one red cent” of the money was actually spent. ⁶⁰ Reforms were slow and it was not until 2009 that USAID officers in PRTs received authorization to spend funds without approval from both Kabul and Washington. At least USAID had access to separate funding mechanisms. The DoA did not. USAID exploited this advantage when it came to project direction and implementation. Access to funding strengthened USAID’s “we know best when it comes to development” mind-set.

USAID prioritized long-term development assistance. It has a nebulous hierarchy, within which each official is an emblem for the whole agency and is given a higher degree of responsibility and authority than the average soldier or DoS official. Andrew Natsios, the USAID director from 2001 to 2006 argues that “it is not an overstatement to say that USAID staff of each mission is the program.” ⁶¹ The autonomy its officials possess fosters the perception that it is more suited to reconstruction and development than other US agencies. After thirty years of civil war, however, Afghanistan did not resemble the environment that USAID had much experience of. It continued to advocate long-term development projects in Afghanistan, akin to the ones that it had conducted in Africa. ⁶² Natsios expressed that USAID officials were the backbone of PRT units due to their capacity to conduct long-term needs assessments, mobilization of local partners, and their comprehensive knowledge of localities in which they were stationed. Rather than include other civilian officials, USAID jealously guarded funds it had obtained and took the credit in Washington for completed projects. This behavior was affirmed when PRTs came under scrutiny from congressional committees near the end of the second Bush administration. USAID justified it on the basis that projects conducted by the DoS and the military were out of tune with the “developmental reality”: “Military planners and to a lesser degree diplomats often take reconstruction as a literal concept: the physical rebuilding of infrastructure that, while a part of reconstruction, is not at the heart of it.” ⁶³

The DoA’s approach also reflected their role conceptions. They advocated certain farming projects and methods, and mirrored, in regard to agriculture rather than development, USAID’s “we know best” attitude. In the hierarchical structure of the PRTs the military was on top, followed by USAID and the DoS, while DoA members were relegated to the bottom. Agricultural advisors were perceived as a nuisance and the small-scale projects they advocated clashed with both USAID’s and the military’s views on the correct approach to the program. ⁶⁴

Each civilian agency, therefore, had particular conceptions of the role and function of PRTs. As a result, many civilian members struggled to embrace the interagency mandate when faced with “inconsistent and contradictory notions of how they should behave.” ⁶⁵ The length of deployments, confusing chains of command, lack of man power, and disproportionate influence between the civilian constituents made it more difficult for role expectations to be learned through institutional context. Instead, a fragmented approach hindered efficient syntheses of agency expertise for the implementation of PRT objectives.

Mitigating Role Conflict

Role conflict had a profound impact on the shape and function of PRTs in Afghanistan. Disparate, even rival, conceptions were the norm and no sui generis, coherent PRT culture evolved. There were missed opportunities to bridge the gap between agency-based role conceptions and interagency expectations. Presidential commitment and comprehensive predeployment and in situ training may have produced more clarity and cohesion. Liaison officers, active in the preparatory stages, could also be helpful. It must be acknowledged that for a plethora of reasons the “best” personnel, military or civilian, simply may not be available. The development of other skill sets, if secondary to that which individuals have specialized in, can assist in emergency operational situations. ⁶⁶

The prestige of the Presidency has been argued to constitute “a useful antidote to bureaucratic immobilization.” ⁶⁷ Presidents can set the rules of engagement, appoint key figures, and establish channels of communication. ⁶⁸ But many of the constraints that the PRTs and the overall mission in Afghanistan faced can be leveled at the disinterest of those who were purportedly its architects. The Bush Administration, for the most part, allowed the bureaucracy to run its own races. Marsh makes the same point regarding the 2006 troop surge in Iraq. ⁶⁹ Besides some prosaic rhetoric, Bush himself offered little assistance to harmonize goals and ambitions. ⁷⁰ Miklaucic considered it a missed opportunity. The President, he argued, had the capacity to galvanize partnerships between agencies that would, among other things, help PRT members recognize their role expectations. Miklaucic acknowledged the problem divergent bureaucratic interests presented, but believes the White House could have done more to mitigate it. Herbst agrees that President Bush had chances to surmount bureaucratic hurdles in Afghanistan. Herbst ran the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which was created to promote coordination between agencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the office was given little authority by the White House. Dobbins felt that the various agencies were not encouraged by the White House to coordinate, within or outside PRTs, which “led a lot of issues to fester that should not have been allowed to fester.” ⁷¹ These accounts suggest that the role conflict in PRTs was a more general problem for the US mission in Afghanistan and that effective leadership would have at least ameliorated and perhaps even resolved it.

There were moves to improve interagency cooperation under the Obama Administration. Obama initiated the surge in 2009, which resulted in an increase in resources, funding, and man power for what he called “the good war.” ⁷² Marsh notes that “Even in a case with substantial national security implications, actors engaged in political combat with one another. The policy preferences of both surge advocates and opponents were strongly influenced by consideration of bureaucratic role and interests.” ⁷³ In this regard, the PRTs were very similar. After the surge decision, however, the importance of the civilian dimension now received more recognition. The Civilian Technical Assistance Program, for example, focused more on Afghan needs and empowerment, and downplayed the “nation-building” aspect in favor of an integrated civilian/military response to “competitive state-building.” ⁷⁴ Overcoming role conflict at this stage of the mission still required a much more concerted effort. Despite awareness of bureaucratic problems in Afghanistan, Obama focused on domestic politics with foreign policy taking a backseat. Richard Holbrooke’s appointment, in particular, was ill-conceived and failed to account for ingrained agency role conceptions.

Presidential will is a potent foreign policy tool, but knowledge and preparation are equally important ingredients for successful interagency initiatives. Experience cannot be bought but a major factor hampering cooperation was the absence of a comprehensive training program before officials adopted their posts within a PRT. Each agency’s inadequate and separate training program made little attempt to promote solidarity. Nonetheless, junior officials who had no experience in dealing with differing agency role conceptions were thrust into the field. Rietjens notes a similar problem within the Dutch PRT in Baghlan. A “process-based partnership model” relied on voluntaristic interaction between the Dutch military and civilian actors, and “unambiguous and useful military guidelines” were lacking. ⁷⁵ Proper training before deployment would have helped prospective US soldiers and civilians embrace the duties and expectations of the program. It would also have a legitimating effect for all members.

There has been debate on how a training regime could be directed. Hernandorena proposed that leadership opportunities for civilians could act as a balancing factor and that clear guidelines combined with joint predeployment training would be beneficial. Carreua proposed that relationship building between civilian and military realms was the key, while Luehrs argued that the purpose of training must be to establish an effective chain of command. ⁷⁶ These suggestions have merit, but they require a concerted effort to emphasize that PRTs are a new institution with interagency expectations. Civilians must understand military culture, procedures, and nomenclature, and vice versa. Any future training program needs to encourage the sharing of ideas between the relevant parties to attune extant role conceptions with new role expectations. This should be combined with monitoring in the field to ensure that members are aware of their mandate and do not gravitate back to “home” agency tenets. ⁷⁷ An integrated training program increased the efficiency and performance of British PRTs in Afghanistan. British hiring practices encouraged “cross-pollination” that prevented ingrained agency-based attitudes from dominating. Similarly, the Canadian PRT based in Kandahar integrated the predeployment training of its officials and soldiers. This helped the Kandahar PRT to successfully create and pursue interagency objectives. ⁷⁸

Conclusion

In mid-December 2001, when US servicemen raised the Stars and Stripes over their new embassy in Kabul, James Dobbins, who at the time was the US Special Envoy, remarked that this “symbolizes the return, after more than a decade of absence, of the US to Afghanistan … we are here, and we are here to stay.” ⁷⁹ The longer term challenge of reconstruction and maintaining stability soon surpassed the initial success of the intervention. Although it cannot be quantified precisely how much role conflict hampered US efforts in Afghanistan, the experience of US PRTs suggests it was significant. By conceptualizing the PRTs as composites of various agencies with overlapping responsibilities, we are able to offer an explanation as to why the PRT’s did not always function in a unified way. Machinations within the foreign policy bureaucracy impeded or precluded the PRTs from optimally fulfilling their functions as a whole-of-government state-building tool.

The generally positive political reception of PRTs, in the United States and some other countries, was offset by role conflict. ⁸⁰ Some PRT members were inclined to embrace the challenges that state-building imposed, but agency-based role conceptions predominated. The security-minded interests of the military meant that PRTs often functioned as insular military strongholds rather than as hubs for development and diplomacy. Personnel of the State Department, USAID, and the DoA echoed respective departmental policy and methods. This resulted in divisive policies, contradictory goals, and incoherent objectives. Such problems were not the sole preserve of US PRTs in Afghanistan. PRTs from Lithuania, Italy, Germany, and Norway were also subjected to role conflict, as were the US PRTs in Iraq. ⁸¹

This article underscores the bureaucratic dimensions to role conflict, which affects most complex external operations involving multiple agencies. Further research might, in comparative or other form, examine the functioning and effects of role conceptions and bureaucratic politics in “nonconflict” foreign environments. If the US engages in a large state-building enterprise in the future, PRTs, or a similar program, will need to be formulated and operated by people with the ability to see past their own agency fortresses. Personnel must be encouraged to embrace the expectations such whole-of-government initiatives require. A comprehensive interagency training program, perhaps deploying liaison officers who can effectively build networks, and supported by energetic involvement from the White House, would mitigate the role conflict observed in Afghanistan.