Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  The statistics confirm Marcos’s analysis: At the end of the secret wars, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras had higher unemployment, lower literacy rates, and lower standards of living than they had before the billions of U.S. dollars had come. Nicaragua and Honduras became second and third only to Haiti as the Americas’ most impoverished countries.

  Back in Tegucigalpa, the legacy is everywhere. Private security has become one of Honduras’s biggest industries. On every street corner and outside almost every shop, for-hire guards cradle shot-guns. Restaurants and nightclubs search patrons with handheld metal-detecting wands; there are lockers in front where people check their firearms along with their coats. The private security industry feeds on itself, creating the conditions for its own growth. As unemployment rises, there’s more work to be done protecting the increasingly conglomerated wealth. As guns in private hands proliferate, things happen. Blame it on the gangs, and there’s an argument for even more private security.

  At COFADEH’s headquarters on Avenue Cervantes, I sat across from Dina Meza, the Honduran recipient of the Amnesty International Special Award for Human Rights Journalism Under Threat for her work investigating the rise of privatized violence in Honduras. In a car outside, a bodyguard waited for her in the car. While reporting for the online magazine Revistazo, Meza has had her phone tapped and received multiple death threats. On the online comments section under one of her stories, someone wrote that her daughter was “very good looking.” In December 2006, her lawyer, Dionisio Díaz García, was assassinated. Meza’s assessment of the situation in Honduras echoed Marcos’s: After the Cold War, she said, the military and wealthy landowners were looking for ways to maintain influence (the influx of American military aid to Honduras had greatly expanded their power). Combine that with a flood of small arms from demobilized fighters along with the economic instability of reduced American aid and neoliberal “free trade” ideologies, and you have a situation where the old Army establishment can step in to fill a “security gap,” this time under the guise of for-profit “security” companies. It was getting to the point where Honduras’s ruling class commanded their own armies, she said.

  In a 2007 report, the United Nations concurred, saying, “Some PMSCs [private military and security companies] are committing human rights violations which go unpunished,” and that “it is worth asking how far a State can cede control of public security to foreign private security companies before losing part of its sovereignty and before the situation becomes one of interference in the internal affairs of that State.”

  Among the ubiquitous armed shopkeepers and handheld metal detectors of Tegucigalpa’s narrow streets, it’s easy to see how local private security industries are both the legacy of American black operations in the region and part of the war on terror’s contemporary geography. Under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, Honduras competes with El Salvador and Nicaragua for outsourced American jobs. A plentiful supply of cheap labor has lured American T-shirt and clothing manufacturers to the country. Cheap labor and outsourcing, however, come in many forms. Your Solutions, the American company that trained cheap fighters at Lepaterique to join the mercenary “coalition” in Iraq, was helping outsource the war. It was doing the same thing as the T-shirt companies.

  In a less visible way, Iran-Contra’s legacy also shaped the United States’ future. The secret wars, off-the-books units, and privatized violence of the 1980s drew a blueprint for the U.S.’s post-9/11 war on terror.

  Aboard an Air Force Two flight between Pakistan and Muscat, Oman, a reporter asked Vice President Dick Cheney about presidential power. Cheney recalled Iran-Contra:

  “Yes, I do have the view that over the years there had been an erosion of presidential power and authority . . . ,” began the vice president, “a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both, in the ’70s served to erode the authority,” he continued. “If you want reference to an obscure text,” Cheney continued, “go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-Contra Committee; the Iran-Contra Report in about 1987.” The minority views, said Cheney, “are very good in laying out a robust view of the President’s prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters. It will give you a much broader perspective.”

  Cheney’s mention of the Iran-Contra report, especially the minority opinion, was indeed a reference to an obscure text. I remember reading the bulk of the report one lazy summer in the early 1990s while waiting for college classes to begin. I, like most people who read it, spent far more time trying to understand the intricate machinations of government and wondered why Ronald Reagan hadn’t been impeached and George H. W. Bush indicted. Above all, I wondered what additional crimes remained uncovered when George H. W. Bush pardoned a slew of conspirators in the early 1990s. I hadn’t bothered to read the wonkish “recommendations,” and definitely not the minority opinions.

  In the majority opinion to the Iran-Contra Affair, Congress described the scandal as “characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy.” The majority concluded that the Reagan administration violated the Hughes-Ryan Act by failing to inform congressional intelligence committees about its covert actions in the Middle East and Central America, violated the Boland Amendment by supporting the Contras, then lied about it and covered it up. The majority opined that a “cabal of zealots” had been in charge and concluded its executive summary by saying, “The idea of monarchy was rejected here 200 years ago and since then, the law—not any official or ideology—has been paramount. For not instilling this precept in his staff, for failing to take care that the law reigned supreme, the President bears the responsibility.”

  Dick Cheney’s office authored the minority opinion.

  Out of the five recommendations, four were recommendations to increase secrecy. The dissenting opinion advocated secrecy oaths for members of Congress, coupled with “stiff penalties” for its violation. It recommended strengthening “sanctions against disclosing security secrets or classified information” and enacting legislation that would allow the president to inform even fewer members of Congress about covert actions. For the minority, the lesson of Iran-Contra was the exact opposite of what common sense dictated. Less oversight, more secrecy. That was the recipe. How to prevent presidents from abusing their power? Give them more power so that whatever they decide to do isn’t an overreach.

  With a few exceptions, the Iran-Contra conspirators came out relatively unscathed. Oliver North went on to make a serious bid for the Senate and enjoyed a healthy career as a public speaker, talk show commentator, and host of his own TV show on Fox News. Elliott Abrams became an official in the George W. Bush administration. John Poindexter went on to become a well-paid defense industry consultant and executive.

  In early 2005, according to Seymour Hersh, the principle players in the Iran-Contra scandal held an informal “lessons learned” meeting about what they’d done nearly twenty years prior and how those lessons could be applied during Bush the younger’s administration. Their conclusions included some familiar corner-stones of the war on terror.

  Even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office.

  All the various aspects of Iran-Contra, from the black Army units that the Enterprise borrowed its structure from, to the mercenaries it employed to conduct its operations, to the informal, quasiprivatized organization, to the “robust” view of executive power its participants adhered to, would create new blank spots on maps in the war on terror. The transformation would begin as CIA operatives fought alongside secret Army units and Afghan warlords on their way toward Kabul, Afghanistan. In Central America, the executive branch h
ad learned that if you did it right—and kept it black—you could get away with it. “We can do whatever we want. . . .” That’s where the logic led. In 2004, a man named Khaled El-Masri would hear those very words at a CIA black site outside Kabul.

  15

  Bobs

  Kabul

  I got an unmediated glimpse of the war on terror’s geography long before arriving at Kabul’s Khwaja Rawash International Airport, whose international code, OAKB, I knew by heart from flight plans of numerous CIA planes. My friend A. C. Thompson was sitting next to me in the coach cabin on a six-hour flight from Amsterdam to Dubai. Thompson is an old friend from the East Bay punk rock scene who went on to become an award-winning journalist. He speaks in thick street slang he picked up covering the criminal justice beat for a handful of local papers. He doesn’t look a whole lot different from some of the folks he writes about: He’s covered with tattoos and his arms and shoulders are bruised and battered from his other passion, training to be an ultimate fighter. Our KLM flight was filled with American defense contractors eventually bound for Baghdad and Afghanistan, along with workers bound for Middle Eastern oil fields.

  As we crossed over into the Middle East, the airplane icon on the in-flight screen veered east over Turkey and curved far out of its direct path, steering clear of Iraq. The route arced over Iran before touching down well past midnight in the Gulf kingdom. From there, it was a cab ride through sauna-like heat and humidity to a spartan terminal on the airport’s far side. On the way to the Ariana Afghan Airlines building, my Pakistani driver worriedly asked whether the United States plans to attack Iran.

  Two distinct types of people filled the waiting area for the flight to Kabul: full-bearded Afghan men wearing traditional clothes and hats, and an equally large contingent of mostly overweight Americans wearing the shorts, T-shirts, and fanny packs that seem de rigueur for Americans overseas.

  Smartly dressed “team leaders” in khakis and polo shirts rounded up the motley crew of American contractors like counselors at a summer camp, the men and women who serve the food, pump the gas, manage the books, indeed do just about everything at Bagram, the main military air base north of Kabul. They had their own charter plane.

  Identification cards dangling from their necks said who they were: These men and women worked for Kellogg Brown and Root, the giant engineering and construction firm that was a subsidiary of Halliburton until April 2007. KBR’s name has long been synonymous with private military contracting. In the early 1990s, then-defense secretary Dick Cheney commissioned the company to undertake a classified $3.9 million study on how to privatize military logistics and support services. When the Clinton administration assumed office in 1993, Cheney became CEO of KBR’s parent company. During the Clinton years, KBR built Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo under the Army Corps of Engineers’ direction and took responsibility for the base’s operation. Government contracts to KBR peaked in FY 2004, when the company received $7.5 billion, the vast majority coming from military logistics contracts. In FY 2007, the company received $4.2 billion in military contracts. KBR ran much of the logistics at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan just north of Kabul.

  KBR’s charter plane from Dubai departed for Bagram an hour before our flight to Kabul. The group of men and women were bound for an oasis of American suburbanism on the Afghan plains: Bagram is an American superbase complete with movie screenings, a Burger King, and a post exchange (PX) offering soldiers and contractors everything from Doritos to iPods. At the base cafeterias, where KBR serves the food, calorie numbers are posted next to each dish. It’s a not-too-subtle hint: American soldiers could actually gain weight eating too much cheesecake while serving in one of the war on terror’s hearts of darkness. Across the street from Bagram’s PX, a razor-wire fence marks the perimeter of one of the war on terror’s most controversial sites, the Bagram prison, known on base as “the other Gitmo.” But Thompson and I weren’t on our way to Bagram.

  Kabul International Airport is an entirely different affair: a boneyard of aluminum aircraft corpses left over from the American bombing and, before that, attacks by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s faction in the post-Soviet, pre-Taliban civil wars that reduced much of the city to rubble. In the early days of the American-led invasion, frustrated American commanders complained that they couldn’t bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age after 9/11 because it had already been done. Fluorescent lights flicker inside the airport, held together with duct tape; the X-ray machines are broken; the stepladder going up to the airplane is a gift from Japan; the bathroom is worth avoiding, to put it mildly. An overweight American sporting Oakley sunglasses, a shaved head, a bulletproof vest, and a black submachine gun keeps watch over the baggage claim.

  Kabul’s streets are a paradigm of informality. Everything is up for negotiation, from cab fares to traffic rules, or from the amount you pay little kids to show you how to avoid the lingering land mines on a hike through the hills to the baksheesh the customs man asks for to expedite your way through the airport. It’s debatable whether one could call the ousted Taliban regime a state, but what followed certainly wasn’t.

  Violence, like the traffic rules, is another informal affair. Hotels, NGOs, and nouveau-riche opium barons in the hills near the InterContinental Hotel all claim their own private security forces. The for-hire gunslingers protecting Afghan president Hamid Karzai, known locally as the “mayor of Kabul,” are employees of DynCorp, an American military contractor. At the Mustafa Hotel, the price of a room includes a man whose job it is to sit outside my room with an AK-47. Could he do anything for me, he asks in broken English.

  “Can I have a towel?”

  Outside in the streets, informality characterizes the built environment itself. Much of the city is an architecture of shipping containers. Around the corner from the Mustafa Hotel, across from the bus station, shipping containers act as storefronts. One sawdust-filled container acts as a furniture-making workshop. Another is a kebab restaurant. An Internet café is built into another. This is an architecture of flexibility and impermanence. A shipping container might host a business, a storage space, even a prison as the situation on the ground changes. In any case, the containers can be quickly and easily abandoned.

  The contrasts between Kabul and the Northern Virginia home of much of the intelligence community couldn’t be starker. In Tysons Corner, flush with classified dollars from a booming espionage industry, fashionable thirtysomething men and women cruise suburban Virginia in hybrid SUVs and Lexuses, spending weekends at boutiques and cafés, shopping malls, and multiplex theaters. By contrast, Kabul’s streets teem with thick-bearded traditionally garbed men passing time with their friends while burka-clad women and children accost white-skinned foreigners to beg for a few pennies. In the outskirts of suburban Virginia, imperial estates of Saudi billionaires and old-world princes and kings sit by the mansions of impossibly rich new-world CEOs and aristocrats along the Potomac’s banks. In the hills overlooking Kabul, families live in mud-brick squalor with open latrines and filthy children whose eyes and noses drool with easily cured but untreated infections. Red-painted rocks warn of unexploded land mines. And yet, the American and Afghan capitals’ geographies are profoundly interwoven. The war on terror justifies the escalating black budgets, the legions of contractors, the wiretappings and waterboardings. Afghanistan and the United States are both part of a “relational” geography. What happens in one place affects the other. From Sunday morning news shows to the pages of The New York Times, a cottage industry of pundits, academics, and analysts dedicates itself to divining the future of Afghanistan. I have a different question: How do facts on the ground in Afghanistan sculpt the future of the United States?

  The Mustafa Hotel is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the archetypal saloon in an old western movie. Home to one of the only places serving alcohol in this deeply religious and conservative culture, the hotel caters to the motley collection of mercenaries, bounty hunters, undercover paramilitaries, and even shadier characte
rs who tend to congregate in war zones. Bullet holes riddle the second-floor dining room’s marble walls and crusty ceiling: leftovers from more than one gunfight that’s broken out among the hard-drinking armed men who’ve called the Mustafa home since the 2001 invasion. A twentysomething Afghan named Abdullah managed the place. He wore a gold chain, slicked-back hair, and kept a girlfriend in the back of the hotel (an astounding transgression of Afghan culture). Asked whether the police were called after any of the gunfights, Abdullah looked at me as if I were insane.

  Wais Faizi, dubbed “the Fonz of Kabul” by his American friends, ran the place. An Afghan-American from New Jersey who’d set up the hotel in late 2001, Wais struck me less like Fonzie than some kind of Afghan Samuel L. Jackson. He had a Glock permanently strapped under his arm and kept loads of vitamins on his desk (he was convinced that the Northern Alliance wanted to poison him). Wais spent the evenings watching Scarface over and over when he wasn’t drinking with the hotel guests. One story held that he’d beaten up a man in Dubai when, after a drunken boast that Faizi was a “Pashtun Warrior,” the man asked if that was a rock band.

  The Mustafa hopped with action in the months after the war began. Packed to the gills with foreign correspondents, aid workers, daring backpackers, and an assorted collection of CIA officers, private security guards, and hacks, the hotel was the place to be for Thursday-night barbecues on the hotel roof. Visitors could kick back in pilot seats looted from old Soviet MiGs sipping the only “green grenades” (Heineken in a bottle) in town.

  Those days were now over. In the West, the lingering war was all but forgotten, and the Thursday-night barbecues had migrated down from the roof and into the Mustafa’s courtyard. The adventure of the initial invasion was gone. The mood was dogged and resigned. The Thursday-night parties were reduced to a handful of Americans sitting in metal chairs guzzling three-dollar Coronas without limes and listening to country music on a laptop.