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and they had to be spirited away by UN workers and Global Risk, a private security firm. The Germans were supposed to be responsible for the four northeastern provinces of Afghanistan, generally considered the most secure part of the country. Although they took their own protection very seriously, caveats meant that security in the north would start to unravel. In June 2004, eleven Chinese laborers who were working on a road construction project south of Kunduz were gunned down in their tents. Not long after that, the convoy of Afghanistan’s vice president, Nematullah Shahrani, was hit by a roadside bomb. The night after I left Kunduz, two rockets hit the Kunduz PRT; four soldiers were injured, one seriously.
    This new model of militarized aid to Afghanistan, then, was a completely hit-or-miss affair. In early 2003 and 2004, the PRTs were still very much a work in progress, and policymakers were still wrestling with basic questions of how to support this experiment. State Department personnel still had few career incentives for working in isolated military outposts; they were not trained to work in an active combat zone; and once in the field, they were all but forgotten by their parent organizations.
    And there was another reason why the reconstruction of Afghanistan would have to wait: The machinery of government was still focused on the war in Iraq. As employees of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Kabul had realized in their 2002 briefing with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, senior leaders in Washington had shifted resources and bureaucratic attention to the Iraq campaign, which was starting to unravel in the face of an accelerating civil war.
    The military’s focus in Afghanistan, then, moved away from stability operations. Emphasis shifted to “Find, fix, and finish”: killing the remnants of the Taliban instead of focusing on securing the needs of the population. Troops and resources would be needed for Iraq, and rebuilding Afghanistan was a manpower-intensive business. A civilian official recalled realizing how far the pendulum had swung away from development work during a briefing with Major General Jason Kamiya, who was the chief operational commander in Afghanistan as of March 2005. Kamiya and his staff had paid a visit to central Afghanistan after a severe spring flood, and PRT members had prepared a briefing on relief distribution. Kamiya told the team leader: “I don’t give a fuck about this flood! What are you doing to kill the enemy?”
    Kamiya remembered it differently. That remark, he said, was “one hundred eighty degrees from my philosophy.” But he acknowledged that there was sometimes friction among the military command, the PRTs, and the development agencies that led to constant misunderstandings. In PRT briefings, people sometimes misinterpreted his questions about how development projects fit into the larger security picture. “This is Ph.D.-level work,” he said. “You’re just trying to mentor both the military side as well as showing your development partner, who is looking skeptically at someone in uniform, it’s not ‘my way or the highway.’ ”
    Afghanistan had started to slip away. Even though the reconstruction effort there was relatively modest in scale, many of the tensions between military and humanitarian missions were already apparent. The entire enterprise seemed chronically short of money, manpower, and time. Equally important, the traditional humanitarian aid community was alarmed by what it saw as a dangerous blurring of the lines, with uniformed soldiers taking on a greater share of development work. Soon, those tensions would become even more pronounced in Iraq, where the U.S. military was beginning to spend much more heavily on infrastructure and governance projects than ever before. In a bid to stop Iraq’s deadly spiral, a key new instrument—cash—would become as important as any weapon