The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  “What have you learned from them?” Gersony asked Williams.

  In his mild Tennessee accent, Williams replied: “I can’t make sense out of a bunch of horseshit.”

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  —

  Kathmandu, Nepal. A ragged, jungly, hilly confection of moldering walls set amidst stage-prop bluish mountains, with occasional clouds that have the look and texture of dirty sponges. As crowded and polluted with motorbikes, automobiles, and rickshaws as it is, Kathmandu never quite gives up the atmosphere of a small town that has simply grown too big. Durbar Square, notwithstanding its rambling clutter of Hindu and Buddhist temples, appears small and intimate for a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century visitor: unmanageable in its number of gods but quite manageable in its absence of yawning space.

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  —

  On the one hand, given the fear of what the Maoists might do and yet how little was known about them in the outside world, you had Time magazine warning about the “Year Zero” in Nepal, with the Maoists instituting a “purification campaign to reduce their territory to chaos and rubble.”1 On the other hand, you had a Boston University professor whom Gersony had consulted, David Scott Palmer, pouring cold water on the whole thesis, saying that the Maoists were just a bunch of high-caste Brahmins who had originated within the Nepalese political system and were limited in their violent intent. Finally, in the middle, was the Washington bureaucratic fishbowl, in which the National Security Council was poised to blame USAID for something that hadn’t even happened yet: the Khmer Rouge–like takeover of Nepal.

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  To find the answer, Gersony spent the better part of 2003 traveling in and studying about Nepal’s midwestern region, including the districts of Rolpa and Rukum—considered the Maoist insurgency’s heartland. His fieldwork also included four adjacent districts, sometimes called the Rapti River Valley. He covered 2,200 miles of the world’s most rugged and mountainous terrain, conducting lengthy interviews with over 150 inhabitants from 66 different villages, in addition to speaking with dozens of specialists in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu and abroad. He left Kathmandu for the field soon after the U.S. government put the Maoists on a terrorist watch list, causing the Maoists to start an all-Americans-out-of-Nepal campaign. Out of fear of being killed or captured, he avoided hardcore Maoist base areas, but stayed in villages immediately adjacent to those areas, interviewing people who went in and out of them to visit local markets.

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  —

  It was another hard, lonely trip.

  In the large village of Liwang, in Rolpa district, he was surrounded by sheer, towering hills the spectacular yellow-green of the inside of an avocado. These were the foothills to the snowy granite fastnesses of the Himalayas. He stayed in a barracks-style, dry-wood firetrap of a hotel, on the lip of an amphitheater that culminated at the bottom in a large flat space used as a soccer field. The room was small, filthy, smelly, and he shared a bathroom with everyone else on the same floor. He slept in the same room with his Nepalese translator. There was no telephone, no radio signal, and of course no electricity or Internet connection. He spent a week in that room, never leaving it. His one meal a day was brought to him by the translator. He had no choice but to keep the lowest possible profile. It was that dangerous, he felt. The hotel proprietor lent him a small table and two chairs. The translator would randomly select people in the nearby market for him to interview inside the room. He typed his notes by candlelight.

  The room had a small smudgy window. One morning he looked out of it and saw men bringing palm fronds into the soccer field. He thought nothing of it. The next morning he saw them hauling in lumber. He was now curious. On the third day they started building a stage, which they decorated with the palm fronds.

  “What’s going on?” he asked his translator.

  His translator went out for a while and when he returned said, “Bob, there’s going to be a big meeting: a Maoist convention.”

  “I had a brave, exuberant, Fred Cuny moment,” Gersony recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I just sit here and be a spectator at the convention, and have my translator tell me what is going on?’ But then I thought it over some more and decided, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here!’ ”

  “Okay, Bob, okay,” the translator said.

  The two quickly packed up and jumped on one of those gaily painted jitney buses that were packed with people and chickens. The bus careened around mountainous curves, stopping often and suddenly to discharge and take on passengers, dust flying. Gersony feared the roadblocks, manned by Nepalese police in some sections and Maoist guerrillas in others. The journey ended when the bus came down out of the mountains and into the flat plain, called the Terai, where Nepal abuts India and where all the good paved roads in the country were. Truly, where the bad roads begin, so too begins the Maoist insurgency. He thought: If only USAID had continued its decades-long road-building project in Nepal, then perhaps there might never have been a Maoist insurgency of such magnitude.

  Heading back on the paved road to Kathmandu, he worried that he had been a coward by not staying to observe the Maoist convention. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t a coward. The difference between catastrophe and no danger at all can often be slight. The fact is, his innate caution, based in large part on his own paranoia, probably played no small role in a lifetime spent alone in conflict zones without a disastrous incident.

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  The scores and scores of interviews he had conducted, however imperfect the knowledge of the interviewees, constituted real detective work, in the manner of his reporting on the utterly confusing situation on the Ethiopia-Somalia border and in other places. One person tells you to speak to another person, whom the translator then locates, and who then provides half of a puzzle piece of information. For in reality, many oral traditions are extremely fragmented and leave much unclear. And it wasn’t as if there were a local historian to talk to, or even books to read about what he specifically needed to find out here. There were no local elites. The closest he came to finding anyone who had a coherent sense of the recent past in this Nepalese rural back of beyond were some elderly men. Up to a point, he was assembling a people’s recent history.

  The result was a 101-page report supplemented by twenty maps, entitled Sowing the Wind: History and Dynamics of the Maoist Revolt in Nepal’s Rapti Hills. The maps, which he personally selected and in some cases designed himself (and were digitally produced by a Nepalese expert), cover in rich, suggestive detail Nepal’s topography, population density, and ethnic and caste diversity, district by district. As usual, he did all the work alone, without research assistants, interns, and secretaries—the staple of consultants and think tanks. Like his other projects, the Nepal report was the product of an obsession. Otherwise, why do it? Topography and the linguistic and ethnic breakdowns were the key to his study, as they always were. This was vital because culture remains the dominant factor that Washington is increasingly unwilling to talk about, because it can’t be quantified and is thus subjective—even as culture is the sum total of a people’s experience in a given geography over hundreds and thousands of years.

  Interviewees were broken down according to their caste and ethnic origin: 17 percent Brahmin, 24 percent Chhetri, 16 percent Magar, and so on. He knew that ethnic identity was tangible to common people to a degree that abstract ideas like democracy and freedom were not. And if you couldn’t remote-sense the life of the common people and their daily, moment-by-moment concerns, you knew nothing about them. While nineteenth-century British explorers (with all of their prejudices) thought like this, increasingly few people in Washington did.

  Gersony’s laboratory was what he labeled “the Red Zone,” the heartland of the Maoist insurgency. It is, as he writes, a heavily forested, mountainous area that achieves a maximum altitude of over 22,000 feet, nearly t
he roof of the world, where sheepherding overshadows farming, and where the population is more animist than Hindu. “Not a single motorable road serves the Red Zone,” whose population is overwhelmingly of the Magar ethnic group, who live in a particularly fractured and isolated terrain, among the harshest in Nepal.2 Gersony then offers disquisitions about the decline of sheepherding and iron mining, and about the area’s tradition of supplying the British imperial forces with fierce Gurkha fighters.

  But, as Gersony tells the reader, beginning in the 1930s and continuing for four decades, the Red Zone became the principal producer of Nepalese marijuana and hashish, even as the Magar people consumed little of the stuff themselves. But just as prosperity came to the area on account of the hashish, the government in Kathmandu, which heretofore had no presence at all in the Red Zone (and had done nothing for it), enforced a strict prohibition on the production and sale of hashish. Nascent prosperity gave way once again to grinding poverty. “The hashish ban, while more than two decades old, has not been forgotten and remains a source of bitterness” among the local people, Gersony reports. He then weaves an intricate story about how geographic isolation, discrimination against an untouchable caste, the bonded labor of the Tharu ethnic group, the rise of Christianity, the continued general indifference of local authorities, the lack of roads and economic development, election fraud, and the failure of the authorities to complete the building of a hospital all bred an attitude of resistance to the Nepalese government. He even goes into excruciating detail about how young Tharu girls were “reportedly obliged to have sexual relations with their landlords,” and elderly men were humiliated when their wives, because of extreme poverty, were forced to sell their traditional jewelry.3

  To state that the Red Zone was among the poorest regions of Nepal was really to say something. Indeed, Nepal was a country where illiteracy was 50 percent and infant mortality 60 percent; a place where 200,000 people, mainly children as Gersony reports, died each year from malaria. As he observes, however uncomfortably, the very lack of colonization by European powers—with the measure of development it brought—combined with an attitude of self-imposed isolation, only made Nepal further removed from modernity.4

  In all of this, as Gersony learned from his interviews, the hashish ban was the beginning of the thread that led to the Red Zone’s radicalization. In the four years after the ban was enforced, allegiance to the Communist Party rose from 10 percent to 60 percent. “By the 1980s, what would become the Red Zone was solidly anti-government and many were convinced that only violent opposition would lead to solutions….” It was in February 1996 that the Maoists launched their People’s War with attacks against police outposts: a reaction to a government-instituted campaign described by human rights activists as “state terror,” even though, as Gersony records through his interviews, the number of incidents and the extent of the overall government campaign may well have been exaggerated. The Maoists, for their part, engaged periodically in abductions, beatings, and burning and mutilation atrocities that are too horrible to quote from Gersony’s study.5

  “Nonetheless,” as Gersony concludes, “up to now Maoist conduct, in comparison with the Khmer Rouge in the two years before it came to power, is significantly different: the frequency of violence has been much lower [generally], and the Maoists have implemented none of the radical social and economic policies which the Khmer Rouge applied throughout areas under their control. A fundamental difference is that outside their heartland [the Red Zone], the Maoists have not found a national issue with which to mobilize a larger movement.”

  In sum, according to Gersony, the Maoists showed little proclivity for social reorganization and engineering. The Maoists simply lacked the systemization and regimentation to inflict their will over large masses of people. They hadn’t succeeded at redistributing land or affecting routine commerce. Even their periodic attempts to ban alcohol and regulate moneylenders had failed. There was simply no totality to their rule. Villages weren’t burned; children weren’t indoctrinated.

  Comparison, as any good analyst knows, is the beginning of all serious scholarship. And Gersony, while not flinching from descriptions of the worst of the Maoist atrocities and the awful social conditions that gave rise to them, nevertheless coolly states that in comparison to the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the Nepalese Maoists represented much less of a threat.

  History has proven him right.

  A few years after he left Nepal, the Maoists came to power: through an election and negotiations. There were no atrocities or land redistributions. Rather, they were co-opted by the democratic system. On September 6, 2012, the State Department removed the Maoists from its list of terrorist organizations, citing their “credible commitment to pursuing the peace and reconciliation process in Nepal.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Micronesia by Way of Iraq

  2003–2008

  The Ghastly Waste and the Looming Threat

  In late 2003, Andrew Natsios rushed Gersony to finish his Nepal assessment. He needed Gersony to investigate something that had gone seriously wrong with USAID’s disaster assistance response team in Iraq.

  The problems with the USAID bureaucracy that Gersony had had hints of starting years ago in Central America were about to hit him in the face.

  Up to this point, the disaster assistance response team, or DART as it was known, had performed magnificently in northern Iraq in 1991 and in Bosnia in 1996. Northern Iraq in 1991 was Fred Cuny’s finest hour, when Cuny’s bulldozing force of personality, in cooperation with Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner and U.S. ambassador to Turkey Mort Abramowitz, had created a security umbrella for Iraqi Kurds in the wake of the First Gulf War and the predations of Saddam Hussein.1 In 1996 in Bosnia, Tim Knight, leveraging Gersony’s concept of ethnic-majority returns, got 2,500 houses built and restored for returning Muslims, helping to avert a possible slide back into civil war. “Fred and Tim both understood that it was only through the unity of political and humanitarian ends that you could really get things done,” Gersony observes, “because humanitarianism doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There are always other considerations,” tied to national interest and what is practical at the moment.

  But then came Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when the late Paul Bell, the head of the DART in Central America, wanted to move on to disaster preparedness training, even as people were still shivering without blankets after their homes had been destroyed and even as the Clinton White House declared the emergency still ongoing. That crisis exposed sharply divergent views born partially of a weak chain of command inside USAID and the U.S. government that bore fruit in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion, when the DART’s humanitarian projects simply failed to materialize, despite cooperation from the U.S. military.

  So in December 2003 Gersony flew into Baghdad from Amman, Jordan, in a darkened plane that landed in a virtual vertical spiral in order to avoid ground fire, sending his stomach into his mouth. Then, along with everyone else on the plane, he was marched to a grim and massive hooch where cots were stacked together. After only a few hours of sleep, at around three a.m., an armored bus escorted by armored personnel carriers transported him and the others into the Green Zone, where U.S. Embassy personnel slept in ugly trailer and bungalow parks amid a maze of tunnel-like concrete Alaska and Jersey barriers. This dirt-filled urban landscape, with its Stalinist-cum-Babylonian architecture—the legacy of Saddam’s megalomania—was bleak, soulless, and sterile. Gersony might as well have been a prisoner of war, surrounded by American soldiers and grizzled contractors. The whole experience somehow reminded him of his days in Vietnam. There was just something so wrong about it all, he thought.

  The entire time in Iraq, except for short trips to Basra in the Shi’ite south and Erbil in the Kurdish north, Gersony never left the Green Zone. The lesser reason was that you generally couldn’t leave except in an armed convoy. The greater reason was that USAID’s disaster assistance r
esponse team hadn’t done a single project worth seeing. It was a disgrace, since USAID and its personnel on the ground constituted America’s interface with the Iraqi people and thus with world opinion. Indeed, history remembers how a great power performs in a humanitarian emergency. Can you provide people with comfort in their hour of epic distress?

  It took Gersony 137 lengthy interviews conducted with USAID personnel during January and February 2004 in the Green Zone, as well as back in the United States, to find out why nothing had been built, why nobody’s distress had been relieved.

  The chronological mosaic he pieced together revealed a completely dysfunctional interagency process, where the head of the DART was not cooperating with the USAID administrator, nor with the U.S. military and U.S. civilian occupation authorities. The civilians from USAID were suspicious of the military and therefore slow-walked cooperation. Indeed, among USAID personnel there was a deep-seated resentment on philosophical grounds to the invasion itself, and this had a corrosive ripple effect throughout the bureaucracy. They were accustomed, as in the Balkans, for example, to working on a mission that was primarily humanitarian. They therefore could not get used to the fact that humanitarianism, whatever the rhetoric of the Bush administration, was only an adjunct to the military occupation. Tim Knight himself offered to step in and help, applying his lessons from Bosnia, but was told “no thanks” by the powers that be in Washington. The issue had gone up all the way to President George W. Bush in two meetings, but even he couldn’t resolve it; nor could Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The failure had much to do with one particularly problematic personality whom I will leave unnamed—someone who had influenced the workings of the DART and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in Iraq—and who was symptomatic of how not only the Bush administration but Washington and the American system itself were simply not ready for prime time in terms of occupying a complicated Muslim country of 26 million people. In the end, the saga that Gersony unraveled was tedious and unoriginal, given all the books and investigative reporting about the failure in Iraq of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the bureaucratic mechanism for American imperial rule in the country in which USAID was integrated. It adds nothing particularly substantial to the larger picture. So I will not burden the reader with it, except to say that having completed telling me the tale, Gersony throws up his hands, and says what he once said about Vietnam: