The Americans Have Landed

A few years ago, with little fanfare, the United States opened a base in the horn of Africa to kill or capture Al Qaeda fighters. By 2012, the Pentagon will have two dozen such forts. The story of Africa Command, the American military's new frontier outpost.

The word came down suddenly in early January to the fifty or so U.S. troops stationed inside Camp Simba, a Kenyan naval base located on that country's sandy coast: Drop everything and pull everyone back inside the compound wire. Then they were instructed to immediately clear a couple acres of dense forest. Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit, needed to land three CH-53 helicopters.

"We had everybody working nonstop," says Navy Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron, commander of Contingency Operating Location Manda Bay, a new American base in Kenya, including a dozen or so on-site KBR contractors. By the next day, every tree had been hauled off and the field graded and packed down using heavy machinery. The pad was completed in thirty-six hours.

Soon after, U.S. special operators flying out of Manda Bay were landing in southernmost Somalia, searching for survivors among the foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives just targeted in a furious bombardment by a U.S. gunship launched from a secret airstrip in eastern Ethiopia.

The 88's job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind.

A few weeks later, the president would announce the creation of a new regional command -- Africa Command -- that would commit U.S. military personnel to the continent on a permanent basis. The January operation would be, in effect, the first combat mission of Africa Command, and it would not go as planned.

Ethiopia's Meles regime, which American Central Command officers describe as "xenophobic to the core," was going into Somalia last December whether the Americans approved or not. The recently installed Somali Council of Islamic Courts, with its loose talk of getting back another star point in its flag (otherwise known as Ethiopia's Ogaden region), simply had to go. As it happened, the Americans, who had been quietly training the Ethiopian troops for years, did approve.

In fact, Centcom was very eager for the operation. Most press leaks made it sound like our main targets were a trio of Al Qaeda senior operatives responsible for bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a decade ago. But the real story is one of pure opportunism, according to a knowledgeable source within the headquarters: "There were three thousand foreign fighters in there. Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were. But we wanted to get them all."

When the invading Ethiopians quickly enjoyed unexpected success, Centcom's plan became elegantly simple: Let the blitzkrieging Ethiopian army drive the CIC, along with its foreign fighters and Al Qaeda operatives, south out of Mogadishu and toward the Kenyan border, where Kenyan troops would help trap them on the coast. "We begged the Kenyans to get to the border as fast as possible," the Centcom source says, "because the targets were so confused, they were running around like chickens with their heads cut off."

Once boxed in by the sea and the Kenyans, the killing zone was set and America's first AC-130 gunship went wheels-up on January 7 from that secret Ethiopian airstrip. After each strike, anybody left alive was to be wiped out by successive waves of Ethiopian commandos and Task Force 88, operating out of Manda Bay. The plan was to rinse and repeat "until no more bad guys," as one officer put it.

"We could have solved all of East Africa in less than eight weeks," says the Centcom source, who was involved in the planning. Central Command was extremely wary of being portrayed in the media as Ethiopia's puppet master. In fact, its senior leaders wanted to keep America's participation entirely secret. The goal was for Ethiopia to get all the credit, further bolstering America's controversial but burgeoning military ties with Meles Zenawi's increasingly authoritarian regime. Proud Kenya, still visibly nervous from the 1998 embassy bombing, would have been happy with a very quiet thank-you.

It was a good plan. And it was leaked to the press almost as soon as it started.

Those involved in the Central Command operation suspected two sources: 1) somebody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who couldn't wait to trumpet their success to bitter personal rivals in the State Department, or 2) a dime dropper from our embassy in Kenya who simply couldn't stand the notion that the Pentagon had once again suckered State into a secret war.

The first New York Times piece in early January broke the story of the initial AC-130 bombardment, incorrectly identifying a U.S. military base in Djibouti as the launching point. That leak just let the cat out of the bag, tipping off the main target, a senior CIC leader named Aden Hashi Ayro, who, according to Centcom intelligence, had been completely fooled up to that point, thinking the Ethiopians had somehow gotten the jump on him. Ayro survived his injuries, and he's now back in action in Mogadishu and, by all accounts, mad as hell at both the Ethiopians and the Americans.

Six weeks and a second Times story later, the shit really hit the fan in Addis Ababa. Now the intensely proud Ethiopians, who had done all the heavy lifting in the operation, were being portrayed as bit players in their own war -- simpleton proxies of the fiendishly clever Americans. After angry denials were issued (Meles's spokesman called the story a "fabrication"), the Ethiopians decided that if the Americans were so hot to mastermind another intervention in Somalia, they would just wash their hands of this mess as quickly as possible.

The return of the foreign fighters to Mogadishu's nasty mix, along with Ethiopia's fit of pique, quickly sent the situation in Somalia spiraling downward. The transitional Somali government, backed by the United Nations, is faltering, and in scenes reminiscent of America's last misadventures in Mog, both Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers are taking fire from 360 degrees' worth of pissed-off Somali clans determined to -- once again -- drive off the invading infidels. Osama bin Laden himself couldn't have written a better ending.

Naturally, it wasn't supposed to happen this way.

America's Central Command set up shop in Djibouti in May 2003, moving ashore a Marine-led Joint Task Force that had been established six months earlier aboard the command ship Mount Whitney to capture and kill Al Qaeda fighters fleeing American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The task force did register one immediate big hit in November 2002: A top Al Qaeda leader was taken out in Yemen by a Hellfire air-to-ground missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in a scene right out of Syriana. But other than that, the great rush of rats fleeing the sinking ship has not yet materialized, and so the Marines took up residence in an old French Foreign Legion base located on Djibouti's rocky shore, just outside the capital.

Uncomfortable just sitting around, the Marines quickly refashioned the task force with the blessing of General John Abizaid, then head of Central Command, who envisioned Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) as a sort of strategic inoculant. If the Marines weren't going to get to kill anybody, then they'd train the locals to do it instead.

But CJTF-HOA, whose area of responsibility stretched from Sudan down to Kenya, soon evolved into something so much more: an experiment in combining defense, diplomacy, and development -- the so-called three-D approach so clearly lacking in America's recent postwar reconstruction efforts elsewhere. Because the task force didn't own the sovereign space it was operating in, as U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq did, the Marines were forced to work under and through the American ambassadors, their State Department country teams, and the attached U.S. Agency for International Development missions. If little of that cooperation was occurring in Kabul and Baghdad, then maybe Africa would be better suited.

The Horn of Africa was supposed to be Washington's bureaucratic mea culpa for the Green Zone, a proving ground for the next generation of interagency cooperation that fuels America's eventual victory in what Abizaid once dubbed the "long war" against radical Islam. But as its first great test in Somalia demonstrated, the three D's are still a long way from being synchronized, and as the Pentagon sets up its new Africa Command in the summer of 2008, the time for sloppy off-Broadway tryouts is running out. Eventually, Al Qaeda's penetration of Muslim Africa will happen -- witness the stunning recent appearance of suicide bombers in Casablanca -- and either the three D's will answer this challenge, or this road show will close faster than you can say "Black Hawk down."

Djibouti

After being ignored since the beginning of time (save for its slaves and its treasure), Africa just got strategically important enough for us to care about. And the Bush administration's decision to set up Africa Command is historic, but not for the reasons given or assumed.

There aren't enough Islamic terrorists in Africa to stand up a full combatant command. If all we wanted were flies on eyeballs, a small number of special-operations trigger pullers would have sufficed for the foreseeable future.

There's oil here, but the United States would get its share whether Africa burns or not, and it's actually fairly quiet right now.

The Chinese are here en masse, typically embedded with regimes we can't stand or can't stand us, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. But the Chinese aren't particularly liked in Africa and seem to have no designs for empire here. Beijing just wants its energy and minerals, and that penetration, such as it is, doesn't warrant Africa Command, either.

America is going to have an Africa Command for the same reason people buy real estate -- it's a good investment. Too many large, hostile powers surround Central Asia for the radical jihadists to expand there, but Africa? Africa's the strategic backwater of the world. Nobody cares about Africa except Western celebrities.

So as the Middle East middle-ages over the next three decades and Asia's infrastructural build-out is completed, only Africa will remain as a source for both youth-driven revolution and cheap labor and commodities. Toss in global warming and you've got a recipe for the most deprived becoming the most depraved.

The U.S., through its invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, has dramatically sped up globalization's frightening reformatting process in the Middle East, and with Africa on deck, the United States military is engaging in a highly strategic flanking maneuver.

Africa Command promises to be everything Central Command has failed to become. It will be interagency from the ground up. It will be based on interactions with locals first and leaders second. It will engage in preemptive nation-building instead of preemptive regime change. It will "reduce the future battlespace" that America has neither intention nor desire to own.

It'll be Iraq done right.

Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa here in Djibouti is the clear model for what comes next, according to Rear Admiral Bob Moeller, who heads up the Defense Department's transition team planning Africom's structure. It is the franchise that will be replicated across the entire continent.

Camp Lemonier, home to CJTF-Horn of Africa, is one nasty, hot, and oh-so-stanky chunk of rock adjoining the Red Sea, a place where the view of the night sky is routinely blocked by the thick black smoke rising from the capital city's burning garbage pit located just outside the base wire. Take away the port and there's not much reason for anyone to come here, where the bulk of Djibouti's 750,000 citizens live.

Djibouti welcomes the Americans as a counterweight to its neighbors, none of whom have the country's best interests in mind. To the north is Eritrea, which broke off from Ethiopia years back and favors Somalia against their common archrival. Landlocked Ethiopia to the west wants a stable Djibouti primarily for its access to the sea. But as Addis Ababa doesn't mind fomenting trouble in Somalia, to Djibouti's south, the relationship is frequently strained.

Besides being welcoming, Djibouti was a natural place for the United States to plant its first African precinct: It's where Africa meets the Persian Gulf.

Camp Lemonier was just a bunch of tents surrounded by walls filled with sand for the first three years, with the serious settling in beginning when the Navy took over the command from the Marines in early 2006. Until recently, the camp's roughly fifteen hundred sailors, marines, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, and civilians were crammed into a very cramped hundred-acre plot, buttressed on one side by the sole runway the task force shares with both the Djibouti International Airport and a French marine base still operating there. Now, thanks to a new five-year lease signed with the Djiboutian government, the camp has expanded to roughly five hundred acres, to include a sprawling suburb called "CLU City," named after the rows and rows of containerized living units, housing two thousand people in all, plopped down in what is certainly one of the world's most brutally utilitarian bedroom communities.

I got a glimpse of CLU City from the guard tower just inside the eastern wall of the base late one Sunday afternoon. The task force's public-affairs officer, Major David Malakoff, was right on my elbow the entire time. Malakoff had walked me around the camp the day before, carefully pointing out the "wire within the wire" that is the special-operations compound. He said no one would be answering questions about them because no one on base knows anything about what they do.

This is a common theme from senior officers at Lemonier. Captain Bob Wright, who heads up strategic communications for the task force, told me that he had "absolutely no access" to the special-ops unit there, despite having "all the right clearances."

As I stood up on the guard tower, snapping photos of CLU City, I looked over toward the Djibouti airport, and my eye was drawn to the sight of men dressed in black scrambling down the side of a nondescript building on the north side of the base.

"What's going on over there?" I asked, pointing.

"Over where?" Malakoff answered slowly. "I don't see anything."

Behind me, the base commander's aide was tensing up.

I pulled my eye back from my camera slowly, looked down off the tower, and calculated the drop in feet to the ground. Better to continue this conversation below.

"Okay, got a nice shot of a plane. I'm done!" I started heading to the ladder. A rapid-fire chorus of "Great!" "Good!" and "All right!" triggered everyone's movement right on my heels.

Back on the ground, Malakoff turned to me and whispered, "You didn't take any shots of those guys on the building, did you?"

"No."

"Good," Malakoff said. "That would have been the end of your camera right there, and maybe more. I'm just trying to look out for you here."

Special-operations enthusiasts, like the journalist Robert Kaplan, love to romanticize the almost limitless utility of the trigger pullers in globalization's dark alleys like the Horn. This makes some sense, as they tend to generate all the "kinetics," or killing, and that's what draws in the international press. But with CJTF-HOA, the regular military is trying to reassume its historical role in the everything else that accompanies the trigger-pulling: the civil-affairs work, the humanitarian stuff, the community projects designed to win hearts and minds. In a pinch, the SOF guys will do these sorts of things as well, but the long war has become one long squeeze on special operators, who are now such rare commodities -- recruitment-wise -- that some are commanding reenlistment bonuses well above $100,000, lest Blackwater USA hire them all.

So the romantic view of special operations encouraged by Kaplan and others, that the SOF guys are all you need for a backwater like Africa, is yielding to a new normal: a strategic view that recognizes there are too few trigger pullers to go around, and with the Marines backfilling Special Operations Command where it can, bases like Lemonier are quickly being taken over, often by reservists who haven't been on an aircraft, ship, or submarine for years.

The U.S. Navy now commands the base, freeing up the Marines for more pressing duty elsewhere in the region, and although CJTF-HOA's C is supposed to signify a "combined" effort involving coalition member states, only a dozen or so officers are actually drawn -- as liaisons -- from ten militaries (five local, five distant) other than our own. Indeed, the French, with their roughly three thousand men next door, along with all their wives and kids living off base, constitute by far the largest foreign contingent in Djibouti. In comparison, the Americans remain somewhat isolated on their base with their 10:00 p.m. curfew, as Lemonier is still considered a "hardship post" that rules out families.

The task force's stated mission -- a profound expansion of, and evolution from, its original capture-and-kill orders -- is to prevent conflict by promoting stability regionally and, in that prophylactic approach, ultimately "prevail over extremism" by never letting its seeds find purchase in local soil. In the Horn of Africa, when you're talking urban, middle-class, educated, commercial, and connected, you're more likely describing Christian populations, and when you're talking rural, impoverished, uneducated, agrarian, and off-grid, you're mostly describing Muslim villages. So it's not enough to interact with the capital's elites. You either go "downrange," as task-force officers like to say, or you might as well stay on base.

In addition to Camp Lemonier, three permanent contingency operating locations are up and running, two in Ethiopia (Bilate and Hurso) and one in Kenya (Manda Bay). A fourth base was established more than a year ago in Gode, Ethiopia, but it was closed as events heated up next door in Somalia. If CJTF-HOA does become the model for Africa Command, the United States could easily be running a couple dozen such military bases on the continent by 2012.

The pattern of our military's expanding presence in Africa seems clear: 1) look where the locals or former colonials set up shop previously; 2) move inside the existing wire first with your special operators for capture/kill missions and military-to-military training with the locals to do the same; and then 3) settle in more formally with new versions of Camp Lemonier. Once set up, the task force storefront can be used to flow trigger pullers onto the scene at a moment's notice -- the precinct that hosts the SWAT team.

To old hands in the State Department and USAID, the Pentagon's growing incursion into long-neglected Africa arouses ancient bureaucratic impulses toward territoriality. They can't help but feel like their turf's being invaded by the gun-toting crowd, hell-bent on opening a new front in a new war.

If Djibouti is a front, then it's a messy one, because the fault lines seem more cultural than tactical. The place is a great example of the tectonic stresses at work here, its battered visage almost exemplifying the numerous civilizations that have crashed into one another here on the streets of this ancient port city.

Djibouti was hopping my last night in town before I flew downrange. Several thousand French sailors were on liberty that Sunday night, fresh off the carrier Charles de Gaulle and the other ships in its task force. Half the port's prostitutes are said to be HIV-positive, and the sailors were taking their lives in their hands.

As the French were landing, I headed out in a Toyota Land Cruiser with Captain Bob Wright and a few of his young officers to find the local Ethiopian restaurant that everyone at Lemonier raves about but no one can ever find. An hour later, we're still not there. Finally, we head into Djibouti's main square, to a restaurant Captain Wright knows well. He jumps out of the Toyota and chats up the owner, who takes the whole hospitality thing so seriously that he sends Bob back to the car with his eldest son as our guide.

We careen through back alleys that squeeze tighter and tighter and finally come upon the Ethiopian Community Club, nestled between a Coptic Orthodox Christian church and a mosque.

The captain pays a couple of kids hanging out in the alley to watch the car, and we head up to the unlighted rooftop restaurant.

Sitting atop the building in the warm night air, we are serenaded from three sides in a mash-up only Tom Friedman could love. The Coptic priest is haranguing his parish in an endless sermon; on the other side, the looming mosque tower is booming its taped call to prayers; and, once our waiter gets around to opening up the makeshift bar on the roof, Eminem joins in about what a whore his mother is from a boom box in the corner. Popping beers and shouting through the din, Captain Wright steers the conversation to the tension between the two halves of HOA's mission, the civil-affairs stuff and what everyone keeps calling "the recent kinetics in Somalia." The whole affair was a nightmare to Wright and his officers, he says, trashing years of patient effort by hundreds of officers to present a new and different face of the U.S. military.

"Strategic communications" means that no one ever sees the men in black rappelling down that building, the same men in black I hadn't seen the day before.

Walking back to the car, Wright says, "Stuff like that makes everyone think that what we're trying to do here at HOA really doesn't count, but it does. You can't make the Horn a better place simply by killing bad guys."

So the question becomes, Is the civil-affairs stuff just a continuing cover for the special operations, or will they eventually yield an Africa that makes American interventions unnecessary? There's a lot of concern here that the establishment of Africa Command may do more harm than good -- the poised hammer that makes everything suddenly look like a nail.

Manda Bay, Kenya

Traveling to HOA's contingency operating location in Manda Bay, along Kenya's eastern coast, is a multiday affair from Djibouti, including a couple of long flights on Kenya's national airline and a two-hour military transport from Nairobi to a makeshift airstrip a few miles' drive from the surrounding Kenyan naval base. On the C-130 flight with the task force's deputy commander, Rear Admiral Tim Moon, we shared the cargo bay with a couple of huge pallets of well-digging machinery and more cases of Red Bull than I could count. The ground crew in Nairobi said we were dangerously overloaded for the short runway, but after being unable to find a forklift big enough to repack the load originally put on board in Djibouti, our Air Force pilots just said, "No worries" (and yes, in Swahili that really is hakuna matata), and we were off in a plane built the year I was born (1962).

We skimmed the landing zone on our first pass to make sure no wild animals were on the strip. From inside the windowless C-130, that experience feels like a last-second aborted landing, which I handled okay because I'd skipped lunch earlier. My seat companion, Major Tesfa Dejene from Ethiopia, laughed when he caught my grimace. "I thought all you Americans like excitement!"

Camp Simba, the Kenyan navy's name for the base, is a struggle against nature. Lieutenant Commander Steve Eron warns you upon entry that the concertina wire strung around the base perimeter is useful only in stopping humans. The animals -- baboons, monkeys, hyenas, deer, and probably more deadly snakes than anywhere else in the world -- "come on through like it's not even there."

"I call it the zoo in reverse," says Eron. "Because they come here to watch us." Something to remember at 3:00 a.m. when you're making that walk to the latrine forty yards from your hut, which is kept incredibly cold with air-conditioning because "keeping it cold keeps those cold-blooded animals out," Eron says.

I make a mental note of where the camp's sole medical corpsman is located.

Manda Bay's origins tell you everything you need to know about why the Americans showed up here. The Kenyan navy built the base in 1992, in response to the collapse of the Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia the year before, right about the time U.S. marines were stepping off their amphibious ships and entering Mogadishu. Kenya's predominantly Muslim northern coastal area is so remote that it was simply easier to send military supplies to its border with Somalia along the coast using naval vessels than to head up inland by vehicles, as the sandy roads are impassable in the rainy season.

Years later, as Somalia began spiraling downward yet again, Central Command sent a special-operations contingent into Manda to begin training the Kenyan navy on antiterrorism tactics using high-speed patrol craft. That effort laid the groundwork for Task Force 88's sudden appearance earlier this year.

Rear Admiral Rich Hunt, who commanded HOA in 2006, likes to brag that "we've never fired a round in anger," which is a little like saying, "HOA doesn't kill people; special operators do."

This is a part of the world where military trucks and helicopters suddenly appearing on the horizon typically set off alarm bells with the locals, because it has usually meant that troops from the capital were coming to round them up and/or kill them, just like our troops were doing to those high-value targets in southern Somalia earlier this year. Here, you're just another scary guy in a uniform until you prove differently.

Jumping out of the tail of the C-130 in Manda Bay's intense March heat, I am surrounded by marines temporarily bivouacked alongside the remote airstrip in a cluster of tents. They're here for a bilateral naval exercise with the Kenyans. The engineering brigade will come ashore soon and help rebuild a school, and Marine doctors will vaccinate the locals and treat all their basic maladies. If this is a cover, it is very convincing.

On posts like this, the rank-and-file American troops tend to fall for the locals. Not in some white-man's-burden sort of way but simply out of the desire not to be sitting around on their asses, marking time across their tours, waiting like firemen for the next blaze.

There's nothing in the traditional military system that demands, recognizes, rewards, or basically gives a flying fuck about making friends with local populations. But still, soldiers like Army Captain Steve McKnight do it.

Team leader of Team B/413th Civil Affairs Battalion, McKnight is an instantly likable fellow. He's a balding bear of a guy whose uniform is a Cubs cap and a bike-messenger bag, and he comes off like a good high school football coach. And he did coach at a school in an unglamorous part of Miami. "Suburban kids didn't need me because they've already got parents," he says.

Unmarried at forty-three, McKnight stumbled into this African posting because of bureaucratic downsizing. "I'm a medical-service-corps officer -- direct commission. I got attached to a reserve combat hospital down in Miami that folded, and there was a civil-affairs unit next to mine, and I walked over there and I was like, 'Hey, I need a home. You guys got a place for me?' "

Civil affairs promised him the most remote locations with the neediest clients. Now sitting across from me at a seedy Internet café located in the sweltering waterfront of Lamu, Kenya, an ancient seafaring port, McKnight downs a huge beer in a single gulp and leans back, flashing his gap-tooth grin like Vince Lombardi. He's been in country for almost six months now and has put in repeated requests to extend his tour of duty, to no avail. "I'll probably get me something deep in South America next," he says.

McKnight in his element is a superb intelligence gatherer (or what they call in spycraft "human intelligence"). We took a long tour of Lamu's labyrinthine back alleys, where the carved wooden doors mark the homes of some of the world's oldest slave traders, and the open sewers reek. I'm holding my nose while McKnight presses the flesh of every shopkeeper we pass, most of whom warmly yell out his name in greeting. He's like some muzungu running for office on Lamu's south side: exchanging gossip, asking how business has been lately, needling them for details about this or that local issue.

Admiral Moon's visit included a showy meeting with senior Kenyan military officers down on the coast to mark the bilateral military exercise with the Americans. A message had just come down from the embassy, which McKnight relayed to Moon: "The embassy says it wants everybody in civvies today, Admiral, just to play it safe."

"The embassy is concerned about some photojournalist snapping a shot of the admiral standing next to some Ethiopian officer in uniform," McKnight said. "After the recent events in Somalia, that could trigger a lot of negative coverage."

McKnight and I skip the photo op because he's got a civil-affairs project to check on: the rebuild of a local rural school by a U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit's engineering battalion. McKnight had done the preliminary scouting work with the Marines weeks earlier, picking out a school that HOA had helped build three years ago but that was already showing some structural problems, in large part because the Americans had relied too much on local contractors, who tend to mix way too much sand in their cement to cut on costs.

"Handing the money over to the contractor, disappearing for the life of the project, and coming back for the dedication? That's a recipe for disaster," says McKnight.

So this time around, the Marine combat engineers not only rehab all the buildings, they erect a significant fence to surround the entire school compound to keep out the wildlife that constantly wanders in, threatening the kids, raiding the pantry, and eating its way through the crops the staff grow to feed themselves and provide meals to the kids.

There's going to be a problem when the Marines fly in the VIPs for the school rededication. Their Chinook helos need such a large landing space that the school's kitchen, made of sticks and mud, is put at risk. Huff and puff and blow your building down. On the spot, the Marines offer to trash the old kitchen and build a new, wood-frame one from scratch.

The headmaster convinces the Marines to build a new food pantry right next door. He is elated. "When you have the food, the kids are so happy, and they come in great numbers, and we keep them in school."

Having worked that scene, McKnight's on to connect his next dot: Sammy Mbugua, deputy director of the local Kenyan National Youth Service facility, a sprawling agriculture camp that experiments with all manner of crops and helps local farmers adopt new practices. It's a run-down collection of buildings, and looking at all the holes that pepper every piece of wood in the place, you quickly come to the conclusion that ants run the place more than anybody else.

McKnight has to reassure Sammy about all those helicopters buzzing by. Mbugua, a slow-moving, middle-aged man whose rheumy eyes say he's no stranger to tropical diseases, is looking for explanations to give all the local villagers who pester him with questions. "Some people are worried, Steve," he says. "Can you hear them go, the aeroplanes?"

McKnight does his best to explain all the activity, emphasizing all the civil-affairs projects being conducted simultaneously alongside military exercises.

"Please tell them there's nothing to be alarmed about," he says. "They're doing exercises. Yeah, that's nothing to worry about."

When the kinetic troop buildup happened on the border earlier this year, it scared everyone. "They were like, 'What's happening? Is there going to be a big battle here or something?' " McKnight says. "The secondary school that does not exist here anymore was taken over by General Morgan, a Somali warlord, in 1992. He destroyed it and they haven't had a secondary school since. The people here remember that."

McKnight confirms with Mbugua that all the youth-service personnel got checked out by the Marine doctors running a medical exercise down the road. "Yes, yes," says Sammy. "They all got their shots."

This is what McKnight calls "housekeeping." And in his work, he has the bearing of a Peace Corps volunteer, not an Army officer. "It's the little things that make the difference," he says. "It's not the big-picture project stuff, it's remembering to bring that fourth grader in Kiunga the English books that we promised her. It's remembering to bring the chief a new stainless-steel coffee thermos. And it's not just the material stuff, it's doing the interaction. It's humanizing the relationship. You know, this business of just giving stuff, it's dehumanized us and it's dehumanized them."

Promising to meet up with Sammy over drinks at a cocktail party hosted by the director of the National Youth Service next week in Nairobi, McKnight is out the door.

Cruising back to Manda Bay, we pass a couple of Kenya Wildlife Service trucks. McKnight has our Kenyan driver pull over, and McKnight exchanges information with the group's leader. "Always got to say hello," McKnight explains. "Those guys are the best security operating in this neck of the woods."

The captain's been in every room along Kenya's border with Somalia that Al Qaeda operatives have been in. He has interacted with every leader they've tried to recruit, telling me that clerics there immediately renounced these guys once their identities became known. While conservative, none of Kenya's Muslims seem, in McKnight's opinion, particularly attracted to radical ideology promoting violent separation from the outside world. Rather, the local mullahs are desperate to have roads improved so that teachers can be attracted from the cities to their remote villages. "Jihadism is a failed concept here," McKnight says. "It's like trying to sell a vegetarian steak."

We'll see.

He tells the story of a primary school deep in the Muslim village of Bargoni where all the girls would drop out once they hit puberty. In Africa, the impulse would be to think: AIDS, birth control, clerics bearing down. But it was something far more prosaic. When I had first arrived inside the wire at Camp Lemonier, I'd seen a portable toilet labeled "Muslim female." The girls at the school were forced to quit at puberty because strict Islamic practice says that males and females can't share the same bathroom once girls come of age. McKnight and his crew offered a simple fix: HOA would build the school a bathroom just for girls.

The impact was immediate. For the first time, girls stayed in school, parents were happy, mullahs were satisfied, local leaders immensely gratified. Word got around: "The Americans did this!" McKnight's eyes well up as he remembers.

Kinetics is what the military does. Iraq is a quagmire because kinetics is all we planned for. But in this new time, on this continent, the military also builds latrines for girls. That simple act might someday keep trigger pullers out of this village.

"I don't need to go back to Florida and my inner-city school," McKnight says. "I've got it all here. It feels just like home."

Africom

For the Pentagon, the corporation that runs the only military on earth with a global reach, the world is carved into regional commands. Until now, Africa has been nothing but a strategic backwater -- the one place where America clearly had no interests and no bureaucratic structure to manage those nonexistent interests. Africa was divided haphazardly between European Command, Central Command, and Pacific Command. In a globalized world where bad actors live to exploit unguarded seams, we seemed to be providing Al Qaeda with several to exploit.

The U.S. military's strategic take on Africa has long been "We have no compelling interests there, and we sure as hell don't want anybody else to have any, either!" It was that attitude that got Washington nervous about the Soviet Union's seeming ideological penetration of the continent in the late 1970s, and it's what gets the Pentagon nervous today about China's obvious economic penetration.

But denying other great powers strategic interests in the region does not constitute a strategy of our own, nor does the great hunt for "high-value targets." Which is why America has come to Africa militarily and isn't leaving anytime soon. The same can be said for China in the economic realm. To work, a lot of preconceptions about what an American military presence is really good for in underdeveloped countries will have to change. What we've not learned in Iraq -- or taken far too long to learn -- will have to be somehow acquired, soldier by soldier and tour by tour, on the ground in Africa.

Rounding a corner in Lamu's claustrophobic back alleys, Captain Steve McKnight leads a military group through a dirty, cluttered courtyard. It's happy hour, and this multinational force consists of six HOA liaison officers -- a Brit, a South Korean, two Ethiopians, a Djiboutian, and a French colonel -- and Admiral Moon, and the whole group is guarded by two "force protection" infantrymen who hover fore and aft like mother hens. We stick out like sore thumbs, and must conjure the past, when Africa was cynically sized up by visiting military officers for its potential to join what passed for globalization a century ago.

Barefoot, dirty kids, wearing clothes whose logos faded two or three owners ago, kick up the dust as they chase one another around the cracked plastic buckets that serve as their mother's laundry system. She's busy hanging clothes out to dry on lines strung between the buildings, and we're ducking under her wash, trying not to interfere.

The woman's husband sits on what passes for the stoop of their house -- a single slab of rock. He's busy slurping a bowl of soup.

The grizzled old fisherman looks up from his bowl at the parade of military officers in mufti and says in perfect English: "Welcome to another world."

Admiral Moon passes under the clothesline, straightens up, and stops. "Thanks. We feel welcome," he says.

The man dismisses us with his hand, turns away to finish his soup, and a few seconds later we're gone.

Find this article at: http://www.esquire.com/features/africacommand0707

June 17, 2007
Troop Influx Complete, U.S. Forces Press Al Qaeda in Iraq

By THOM SHANKER and MICHAEL R. GORDON
BAGHDAD, June 16 — With the influx of tens of thousands of additional combat troops into Iraq now complete, American forces have begun a major offensive against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia on the outskirts of Baghdad, the top American commander in Iraq said Saturday.

The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a news conference in Baghdad along with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said the operation was designed to take the fight to Al Qaeda’s hide-outs in order to cut down the group’s devastating campaign of car bombings.

The offensive comes at a critical time in the war, with increasing American casualties and rising domestic pressure to show results or begin troop withdrawals, and just three months before a formal assessment of the military buildup President Bush ordered. It also suggests that the military is re-evaluating its strategy of focusing on stemming sectarian violence in Baghdad and is acknowledging that the so-called troop surge has been unable to dampen a wave of insurgent attacks that have all but stalled attempts at political reconciliation.

The new emphasis on attacking the insurgent cells and bomb-making factories outside the capital is expected to be a sustained one, involving tough fighting. But creating lasting effects from such pushes has been challenging; in the past, insurgents have repeatedly been driven from one location only to resurface in another.

The heart of the American buildup of 30,000 extra troops is the deployment of five American brigade combat teams, a fighting core of more than 20,000 soldiers. Along with an additional Marine Expeditionary Unit, the last of those troops arrived in the past few days, bringing the total number of American troops in Iraq to about 155,000.

The additional American forces, General Petraeus said Saturday, would allow the United States to conduct operations in “a number of areas around Baghdad, in particular to go into areas that were sanctuaries in the past of Al Qaeda.”

Recently, the insurgent group has blown up bridges and is believed to be behind the recent bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra, which was heavily damaged in a previous bombing last year. Shiites have been the most heavily hit by the insurgent attacks, and officials in the Shiite-led government have bluntly said that no political deal with Sunni Arabs would be possible until the violence eases.

The scope, timing and details of the new American operations are classified. But one sign of the stepped-up activity was apparent in a recent operation reported by the Third Infantry Division, which is operating in the Sunni Arab belts south of the capital. In that case, American attack helicopters and Iraqi forces attacked an insurgent cell, killing several and capturing others.

The decision to mount more attacks in the Sunni belts is a trade-off in a military sense as it will limit the number of American forces that are available to secure neighborhoods inside the capital. General Petraeus appeared to allude to that fact Saturday.

“There has never been a military commander in history who wouldn’t like to have more of something or other,” he said. “That characterizes all of us here.

“The fact is, frankly, that we have all that our country is going to provide us in terms of combat forces — that is really it, right now.”

As part of the effort to weaken Al Qaeda’s forces outside Baghdad, the United States military has also begun working with Sunni tribes in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, and is hoping to expand this approach to other areas of Iraq.

This is not the first time that American forces have taken on Qaeda strongholds. The military’s assault in 2004 of Falluja, the city in Anbar Province that was the center of insurgent strength then, was the biggest ground operation since the invasion.

But while that effort seemed to drive insurgents away from the city, the military was unable to completely loosen Al Qaeda’s hold on other parts of the province. And even that partial success has highlighted the flexibility of the insurgents. As gains have been made in Anbar, commanders say, the group has shifted its main body into Diyala Province, just north of the capital, flowing away and creating new violence.

In the Baghdad news conference, Defense Secretary Gates insisted that the military buildup was beginning to show dividends.

“The full impact of the surge is just beginning to be felt,” said Mr. Gates, who was making his fourth visit to Iraq in his six months as defense secretary.

Mr. Gates arrived in Iraq to express Washington’s disappointment with the pace of political reconciliation under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and to urge accelerated efforts to reach a series of political benchmarks to lower tensions among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Mr. Gates also met with the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, who said that no outside power could compel the Iraqis to reach accommodation.

“These have to be Iraqi decisions and Iraqi compromises if they are really going to take effect,” Ambassador Crocker said. “We can’t come up with solutions as the United States and expect to impose them or impose timelines and say, ‘You’ve got to do this for the future of your country.’ ”

Earlier Saturday, Mr. Gates visited a joint security station in the Karada region of southeastern Baghdad, where American forces conduct missions along with Iraqi military and police units from inside a secured, walled compound.

The American commander at the compound, Maj. Christopher Wendland, of the Second Battalion, 17th Field Artillery, said attacks in his area had dropped to 5 or 6 per week from 15 to 16 per week about a month ago.the number of improvised bombs planted in the area had gone up.

Earlier, in the news conference, General Petraeus acknowledged that the results of the Baghdad security push had been mixed so far.

“We are ahead in some areas and behind in others,” General Petraeus said.

Troops would continue operating in neighborhoods of Baghdad to calm Sunni-Shiite tensions and “ensure that fault lines do not once again produce a spiral of violence,” he added.

In addition, the general said, Iraqi and American forces will be operating more intensively in larger population centers outside of Baghdad, such as Diyala Province and similar areas where violence has spiked as Al Qaeda has moved in.

In advance of the full complement of troops landing in Iraq, the American military has carried out targeted raids against Al Qaeda, focused its intelligence efforts and ordered Special Operations forces to move in and out of contested areas in what General Petraeus described as “shaping operations” ahead of future missions.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting.

June 16, 2007
Polished and Upbeat, Romney Struggles to Connect

By MARK LEIBOVICH
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — Mitt Romney loves the word “great.” As in, “Have a great day,” “Things are going great,” “I’m feeling great.” Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, also looks great, sounds great and smells great, like shaving cream. Everyone who asks him something gets a “Thanks, great question.”

That includes Steven Faux of Clive, Iowa, who attended a recent “Ask Mitt Anything” event. In a halting cadence, Mr. Faux (pronounced “Fox”) explained that his 26-year-old son, an Army National Guardsman, was about to leave for Iraq.

“What is your plan to fix this problem?” Mr. Faux asked, his voice breaking slightly.

If Mr. Romney was feeling the man’s pain, he was not inclined to say so. Instead, he gave the requisite thanks for the son’s service, and then jumped into a rat-a-tat-tat litany of his Iraq talking points: He hails the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He acknowledges that the United States was “underprepared” for its aftermath. He attacks Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, for saying the war was “lost.”

After eight minutes, Mr. Romney concluded, “Thanks, great question,” and moved on.

Mr. Faux sat with his arms folded. “Sort of a stock response,” he complained later in an interview.

By any measure, Mr. Romney, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, is a master pitchman and presenter, bred in politics (his father, George, was the governor of Michigan), enriched in business and battle-tested in the Republican pariah colony of Massachusetts. He is relentlessly upbeat (“I’m feeling incredibly optimistic about our future,” he says at campaign events.) His polished “presidential bearing” has been marveled upon, a package of great hair, sleek suits and dreamy smiles well matched to podiums and magazine covers.

But can he connect with voters? While he is climbing in the polls, some people who have seen him close up at recent events describe him as impressive but somewhat detached. He struggles at times to convey a sense that he is an accessible mortal — that he can be spontaneous, that he bears scars and can appreciate at gut-level the struggles of ordinary Americans.

“He doesn’t really seem to be like the rest of us,” said Denis Joyal, a machinist from Belmont, N. H., who heard Mr. Romney at an American Legion hall in Alton, N.H. He called the candidate “sort of high-class” and “a little too perfect.”

Mr. Romney, a 60-year-old Harvard law and business school graduate, former venture capitalist worth nearly $350 million and clean-living teetotaler with a weakness for Vanilla Coke, is operating in a political environment in which candidates are expected to prove they are “regular” people, fit to be neighbors as well as presidents. It is not enough for a candidate to have command of issues, or a stage, or a camera — he must give voters a sense of everyday kinship.

This is something of a challenge for Mr. Romney, derided in some unfriendly circles as “Governor Perfect,” a term he chuckles at and flatly rejects. “That’s not something that people who know me well would suggest is the right handle,” he said in an interview. “I have plenty of weaknesses, plenty of failings.”

His supporters say that the impression that Mr. Romney does not connect with voters is a temporary problem, if it is one at all. “I have heard those comments from people,” said Tom Rath, a former New Hampshire attorney general and longtime Republican supporter in the state who is serving as a senior adviser to Mr. Romney’s campaign.

“Of all the problems for a candidate to have, it’s not a bad one,” said Mr. Rath, adding that as Mr. Romney becomes better known, he will become more accessible, and likable, to voters. “I don’t think this is a problem we won’t be able to overcome.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign enterprise somewhat resembles the “roadshow” that precedes an initial public stock offering. That is the intense period in which a chief executive and his top people barnstorm the country pitching their soon-to-be-public company and its stock to exclusive groups of big institutional investors. As a general rule, the roadshow is not a time for the head of a company or would-be head of a country to volunteer vulnerabilities.

Unlike some other politicians, Mr. Romney is not prone to unburdening himself of his life’s travails on the stump.

At a speech to an insurance company in Dover, N.H., Mr. Romney was asked about stem-cell research by Karen Olivier, of Epping, who like Ann Romney suffers from multiple sclerosis. “I have a personal interest in this, as does your wife,” Mrs. Olivier added.

Mr. Romney ignored the opening about his wife and gave a lengthy version of his standard stem-cell speech. “Thanks, great question,” he said, wrapping up.

Mr. Romney does not like to digress. He talks fast, walks fast through a crowd and moves fast from one question to another. He is loath to get off point or behind schedule. There is a definite “master of the universe” flavor to his campaign.

He travels with an entourage that includes two or three “operations” guys who serve as advance men and a security detail. (Between stops in New Hampshire, this reporter found himself trailing the former governor’s S.U.V. on a back road, only to be led to the shoulder and instructed to “veer off” by a man wearing an earpiece who emerged from Mr. Romney’s car. “We ran your license plate,” he told the reporter, and explained that no one was permitted to follow Mr. Romney’s vehicle.)

The operations guys are ready to assist with any unpleasantness, like the people who keep showing up at Mr. Romney’s events dressed as a dolphin named Flipper to highlight the candidate’s so-called flip-flops on issues. (Two Flippers stood outside Mr. Romney’s event in West Des Moines. One held a “Señor Flipper” sign, presumably to appeal to Spanish-speaking voters or dolphins.) In Laconia, N. H., Flipper was accused of creating a disturbance and was ushered out of the hall by Mr. Romney’s staff members during his speech.

At a high school in Alton, Mr. Romney addressed about 500 students who exhibited a most un-Romneylike assortment of hair colors and lip-piercings. He introduced Matt Lauer of NBC, who was trailing Mr. Romney with a “Today” show crew. As Mr. Lauer walked on stage to loud applause, Mr. Romney mentioned that he recently came across a magazine promoting Mr. Lauer as having “the best bod in a bathing suit” among morning TV hosts.

The students whooped.

Mr. Lauer took the microphone from Mr. Romney, turned to the audience and asked, “Did he connect with you today?”

The reaction was more subdued.

Before leaving, Mr. Romney reasserted his “enormous faith in the American people,” in keeping with his determined optimism. While all candidates like to exude a sense of hope (“I’m pessimistic” is not something winning candidates typically say), Mr. Romney takes it up a notch, or 10. To inhabit his circuit is to visit something akin to a Political Oz, with “Beautiful Day” by U2 blaring over loudspeakers and a permasmiling candidate whose deep, cockpit-ready voice would reassure any cabin full of fliers during heavy turbulence.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” Mr. Romney marveled in New Hampshire upon seeing a Boston television reporter, Jon Keller.

“Isn’t every day like that in Romney World?” Mr. Keller wisecracked.

While buoyant, Mr. Romney is hardly freewheeling and leaves little to instinct. “Some people go with the gut feel, but that’s not the school I come from,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. “I believe in being highly analytical and deliberative in making decisions.”

In Alton, a student asked him whom he considered to be his chief competition in the race for the Republican nomination.

“Me,” Mr. Romney said. “I don’t want to mess this up somehow, to knock myself off this stage.” The remark conjures the experience of his father, whose 1968 presidential campaign imploded over an ill-considered comment that American generals had “brainwashed” him into supporting the war in Vietnam.

Mr. Romney says the self-destruction of his father’s campaign is “probably not that applicable to today.” But he goes on to enumerate the importance of candidate discipline, now more than ever.

“Running for president in the YouTube era, you realize you have to be very judicious in what you say,” Mr. Romney said. “You have to be careful with your humor. You have to recognize that anytime you’re running for the presidency of the United States, you’re on.”

This is something of a notable admission from Mr. Romney, that he is “on” all the time and has no intention of letting down his fabulous hair in public. But the beauty of a long presidential campaign is that only so much can be scripted and controlled. Inevitably, some unwelcome reality will intrude, and the candidate may reveal himself in an unguarded moment. Or not.

On a perfect cloudless morning, the candidate stepped into a cafe and bakery in Dover, N.H., past an assortment of wedding cakes in the window, white as his teeth. He encountered an elderly man at the counter who promptly disparaged his Mormon religion.

“I am someone who will not vote for a Mormon,” the man said.

“Can I shake your hand anyway?” Mr. Romney asked.

“No,” the man said, turning back to his eggs. Mr. Romney, moving right along, urged him to “Have a great day anyway.” He bought a bag of cinnamon buns on the way out.

Iraq Contractors Face Growing Parallel War
As Security Work Increases, So Do Casualties
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 16, 2007; A01

BAGHDAD -- Private security companies, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. military and State Department contracts, are fighting insurgents on a widening scale in Iraq, enduring daily attacks, returning fire and taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.

While the military has built up troops in an ongoing campaign to secure Baghdad, the security companies, out of public view, have been engaged in a parallel surge, boosting manpower, adding expensive armor and stepping up evasive action as attacks increase, the officials and company representatives said. One in seven supply convoys protected by private forces has come under attack this year, according to previously unreleased statistics; one security company reported nearly 300 "hostile actions" in the first four months.

The majority of the more than 100 security companies operate outside of Iraqi law, in part because of bureaucratic delays and corruption in the Iraqi government licensing process, according to U.S. officials. Blackwater USA, a prominent North Carolina firm that protects U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, and several other companies have not applied, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Blackwater said that it obtained a one-year license in 2005 but that shifting Iraqi government policy has impeded its attempts to renew.

The security industry's enormous growth has been facilitated by the U.S. military, which uses the 20,000 to 30,000 contractors to offset chronic troop shortages. Armed contractors protect all convoys transporting reconstruction materiel, including vehicles, weapons and ammunition for the Iraqi army and police. They guard key U.S. military installations and provide personal security for at least three commanding generals, including Air Force Maj. Gen. Darryl A. Scott, who oversees U.S. military contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'm kind of practicing what I preach here," Scott said in an interview on the use of private security forces for such tasks. "I'm a two-star general, but I'm not the most important guy in the multinational force. If it's a lower-priority mission and it's within the capabilities of private security, this is an appropriate risk trade-off."

The military plans to outsource at least $1.5 billion in security operations this year, including the three largest security contracts in Iraq: a "theaterwide" contract to protect U.S. bases that is worth up to $480 million, according to Scott; a contract for up to $475 million to provide intelligence for the Army and personal security for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and a contract for up to $450 million to protect reconstruction convoys. The Army has also tested a plan to use private security on military convoys for the first time, a shift that would significantly increase the presence of armed contractors on Iraq's dangerous roads.

"The whole face of private security changed with Iraq, and it will never go back to how it was," said Leon Sharon, a retired Special Operations officer who commands 500 private Kurdish guards at an immense warehouse transit point for weapons, ammunition and other materiel on the outskirts of Baghdad.

U.S. officials and security company representatives emphasized that contractors are strictly limited to defensive operations. But company representatives in the field said insurgents rarely distinguish between the military and private forces, drawing the contractors into a bloody and escalating campaign.

The U.S. military has never released complete statistics on contractor casualties or the number of attacks on privately guarded convoys. The military deleted casualty figures from reports issued by the Reconstruction Logistics Directorate of the Corps of Engineers, according to Victoria Wayne, who served as deputy director for logistics until 2006 and spent 2 1/2 years in Iraq.

Wayne described security contractors as "the unsung heroes of the war." She said she believed the military wanted to hide information showing that private guards were fighting and dying in large numbers because it would be perceived as bad news.

"It was like there was a major war being fought out there, but we were the only ones who knew about it," Wayne said.

After a year of protests by Wayne and logistics director Jack Holly, a retired Marine colonel, the casualty figures were included. In an operational overview updated last month, the logistics directorate reported that 132 security contractors and truck drivers had been killed and 416 wounded since fall 2004. Four security contractors and a truck driver remained missing, and 208 vehicles were destroyed. Only convoys registered with the logistics directorate are counted in the statistics, and the total number of casualties is believed to be higher.

"When you see the number of my people who have been killed, the American public should recognize that every one of them represents an American soldier or Marine or sailor who didn't have to go in harm's way," Holly said in an interview.

According to the logistics directorate, attacks against registered supply convoys rose from 5.4 percent in 2005, to 9.1 percent in 2006, to 14.7 percent through May 10. The directorate has tracked 12,860 convoys, a fraction of the total number of private supply convoys on Iraqi roads.

"The military are very conscious that we're in their battle space," said Cameron Simpson, country operations manager for ArmorGroup International, a British firm that protects 32 percent of all nonmilitary supply convoys in Iraq. "We would never launch into an offensive operation, but when you're co-located, you're all one team, really."

ArmorGroup, which started in Iraq with 20 employees and a handful of SUVs, has grown to a force of 1,200 -- the equivalent of nearly two battalions -- with 240 armored trucks; nearly half of the publicly traded company's $273.5 million in revenue last year came from Iraq. Globally, ArmorGroup employs 9,000 people in 38 countries.

The company, with headquarters at a complex of sandstone villas near Baghdad's Green Zone, is acquiring a fleet of $200,000 tactical armored vehicles equipped with two gun hatches and able to withstand armor-piercing bullets and some of the largest roadside bombs.

The U.S. Labor Department reported that ArmorGroup has lost 26 employees in Iraq, based on insurance claims. Sources close to the company said the figure is nearly 30. Only three countries in the 25-nation coalition -- the United States, Britain and Italy -- have sustained more combat-related deaths.

A Turning Point
In spring 2004, Holly built the logistics network for Iraq's reconstruction from scratch. The network delivered 31,100 vehicles, 451,000 weapons and 410 million rounds of ammunition to the new Iraqi security forces, and items as varied as computers, baby incubators, school desks and mattresses for every Iraqi government ministry. The network came to rival the military's own logistics operation.

Holly also discovered he was at the center of an undeclared war.

He assembled a small private army to protect materiel as it flowed from border crossings and a southern port at Umm Qasr to the 650,000-square-foot warehouse complex at Abu Ghraib and on to its final destination.

"The only way anything gets to you here is if somebody bets their life on its delivery," said Holly, a burly civilian with a trimmed gray beard who strikes a commanding presence even in khakis, multicolored checked shirts and tennis shoes. "That's the fundamental issue: Nothing moves anywhere in Iraq without betting your life."

The most dangerous link in Holly's supply chain is shipping. It requires the slow-moving convoys to navigate Iraq's dangerous roads. Holly erected a ground-traffic control center in a low-slung trailer near his office in Baghdad's Green Zone. The security companies monitor their convoys in air-conditioned silence, which is shattered by a jarring klaxon each time a contractor pushes a dashboard "panic button," signaling a possible attack.

On May 8, 2005, after dropping off a load that included T-shirts, plastic whistles and 250,000 rounds of ammunition for Iraqi police, one of Holly's convoys was attacked. Of 20 security contractors and truck drivers, 13 were killed or listed as missing; five of the seven survivors were wounded. Insurgents booby-trapped four of the bodies. To eliminate the threat, a military recovery team fired a tank round into a pile of corpses, according to an after-action report.

The convoy had been protected by Hart Security, a British firm that used unarmored vehicles. Within a month, another Hart-led convoy was hit. The team leader informed the ground-control center by cellphone that he was running out of ammunition. He left the cellphone on as his convoy was overrun.

"We listened to the bad guys for almost an hour after they finished everybody off," Holly said.

The attacks represented a turning point in the private war.

Holly vowed he would never again use unarmored vehicles for convoy protection. He went to his primary shipper, Public Warehousing Co. of Kuwait, and ordered a change. PWC hired ArmorGroup, which had armed Ford F-350 pickups with steel-reinforced gun turrets and belt-fed machine guns.

Other companies followed suit, ramping up production of an array of armored and semi-armored trucks of various styles and colors, until Iraq's supply routes resembled the post-apocalyptic world of the "Mad Max" movies.

Bolstered Tactics, Armor
ArmorGroup started in Iraq in 2003 with four security teams and 20 employees. It now has 30 mechanics to support its ground operation. "It's a monster," said Simpson, the country operations manager, strolling past a truck blown apart by a roadside bomb.

ArmorGroup operates 10 convoy security teams in support of Holly's logistics operation. The company runs another 10 to 15 under a half-dozen contracts, as well as for clients who request security on a case-by-case basis, Simpson said.

The company charges $8,000 to $12,000 a day, according to sources familiar with the pricing, although the cost can vary depending on convoy size and the risk. For security reasons, the convoys are limited to 10 tractor-trailers protected by at least four armored trucks filled with 20 guards: four Western vehicle commanders with M-21 assault rifles and 9mm Glock pistols, and 16 Iraqis with AK-47s.

The Western contractors, most with at least 10 years' experience, are paid about $135,000, the same as a U.S. Army two-star general. The Iraqis receive about a tenth of that.

"Every time I think about how it was at the beginning, arriving here with a suitcase and $1,000, and there was no one else around, it's just incredible," Simpson said. "Nobody envisioned that private security companies would be openly targeted by insurgents."

ArmorGroup prides itself on a low-key approach to security. Its well-groomed guards travel in khakis and dark blue shirts. The company's armored trucks are adorned with stickers issued by the Interior Ministry, where the company is fully licensed. Holly's former deputy, Victoria Wayne, said ArmorGroup turned down an opportunity to use more powerful weaponry as the insurgent threat increased.

"As a publicly traded company, they didn't want to be perceived as a mercenary force," she said.

But the company is under constant attack. ArmorGroup ran 1,184 convoys in Iraq in 2006; it reported 450 hostile actions, mostly roadside bombs, small-arms fire and mortar attacks. The company was attacked 293 times in the first four months of 2007, according to ArmorGroup statistics. On the dangerous roads north of Baghdad, "you generally attract at least one incident every mission," Simpson said.

Allan Campion, 36, who joined ArmorGroup after 18 years in the British infantry, said one of his convoys was recently attacked three times on a two-mile stretch outside Baghdad. One bomb exploded near the team leader's vehicle, but the convoy managed to continue, he said. Within minutes, another bomb exploded, followed by small-arms fire.

A firefight ensued as the convoy continued through the "kill zone," Campion said.

"We were still moving, so whether you've hit anybody or not, it's very hard to say," he said.

With the insurgents employing more-lethal roadside bombs, ArmorGroup has responded by changing tactics and spending $6.8 million to bolster its armor. Its new armored "Rock" vehicles are built on Ford F-550 chassis and are favored by ArmorGroup because of a V-shaped hull that provides better protection against roadside bombs.

Chris Berman, a former Navy SEAL who helped design the Rock for North Carolina-based Granite Tactical Vehicles, said its main deterrent is its twin gun hatches. "That gives you twice as much firepower," Berman said. "With two belt-fed machine guns in there, that's enough to chew up most people."

'Caught Up in the Mix'
Built on the site of a former Iraqi tank factory, the Abu Ghraib warehouse complex is known variously as Fort Apache, the Isle of Abu and Rocket City, a reference to when rockets and mortars frequently rained down on the compound.

The bleak, windswept facility consists of 64 buildings spread over a 1 1/2 -mile-long and half-mile-wide area; employees of Public Warehousing (now Agility) -- barricaded inside the fortress -- installed a driving range and a small fishing pond for entertainment. The perimeter is protected by double blast walls, guard towers equipped with belt-fed Dushka machine guns and uniformed Kurdish guards who answer to a military-style rank structure and carry AK-47 assault rifles.

Over the past two years, warehouse personnel "probably average four to six KIA a month and six to eight wounded a month," said Leon Sharon, the Falcon Security representative, dressed in a khaki military uniform with a "Falcon 6" patch identifying him as a field commander for the company.

"It's not a game," Sharon said. "People get killed here trying to go home. People trying to come here get killed because they work here. People on convoy escort get killed because of the materiel that we're shipping out of here. Truck drivers get killed because they get caught up in these ambushes. And you have security personnel who end up caught up in the mix. And the work has to go on as normal."

Attacks on Iraqi employees became so common that a trauma center was set up inside the main warehouse. Dozens of Iraqis, fearful of going home after work, live in barracks-style housing in the compound.

Sharon, 61, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is rail thin with a weathered, intelligent face shaped by chain-smoking and four decades of military work. He works out of a small office that is also his bedroom. A humidor sits on his desk. A U.S. flag covers his window. Cartons of Marlboro Reds are stacked behind him near a leather-bound copy of the Koran.

Sharon called Falcon Security a "private military company."

"When you have this many men, you don't manage it as you do a corporation. You manage it very much in the military style," he said. "My men aren't carrying potatoes; they're carrying AK-47s. It's not pilferage we're worried about. It's people storming the walls."

Falcon performs "a military-like role" in Iraq, he said, "with one key exception: We do not, and have no desire to, conduct offensive operations."

But even behind the blast walls, the private and public wars collide, Sharon said. Last year, insurgents attacked a passing U.S. military convoy on a highway outside the gates. Kurdish guards in one of the towers opened fire, killing two insurgents. "The Americans were thrilled," he said.

"All of the work that's being conducted here in Iraq by private security companies would have to be conducted by somebody, and that somebody is U.S. military personnel," he said. "If you had 500 soldiers here, that's 500 less soldiers that you have on the battlefield. And this isn't the only site. There are hundreds of sites around Iraq where you have private security. Where are you going to get this personnel?"

Sharon turns 62 in October. Asked when he planned to leave Iraq, he smiled.

"Last man here, please put the key under the door," he said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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