May 28, 2002 6 min read

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (AP) -For months, the U.S. military and aid groups working in Afghanistan have been wrangling over a seemingly peripheral issue: what soldiers wear. On the surface, the dispute is about whether aid workers are endangered by armed soldiers doing humanitarian jobs like building schools or digging wells while wearing civilian clothes and beards in an effort to blend in and protect themselves.

Aid groups say militants looking to make a statement against the United States could accidentally snatch or kill an impartial aid worker if they can’t tell the difference.

Underneath, however, is what all sides agree is a much broader debate about whether the U.S. military should be in the humanitarian aid business at all. Part culture clash, part turf war, the uniform dispute has stirred up emotions on both sides.

Some say it also reflects internal debates at the center of both institutions.

“This is an issue at the heart of the military. It remains divided on how to deal with its state-building, humanitarian role and its warrior role,” said David King, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who studies confidence in the U.S. military.

And with the explosion of activity by non-governmental organizations in the last decade around the world, “it’s not just the military that’s trying to define its role – the NGOs are, too,” King said.

The uniform dispute has been building since the war began last fall. Operating in a hostile and unstable environment, some 300 U.S. soldiers doing humanitarian and other civilian projects around Afghanistan wore plain clothes and grew beards in an effort to avoid being easy targets for snipers.

Aid groups became furious over the practice, arguing it endangers and politicizes their work if Afghans can’t easily distinguish a neutral aid worker from an armed soldier. They pressed their case in Congress and to the administration, all the way up to President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

Among those supporting the aid groups was Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Foreign Operations Subcommittee.

“Non-governmental organizations have been working in the region for many years and will continue their operations after military forces depart. While aid workers already face significant risks, it is important to ensure that their safety is not further compromised over the long term,” the senator wrote in an April letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

So far, there have been no cases of aid workers being harmed after being mistaken for soldiers. There have, however, been multiple incidents of allied soldiers in uniform being attacked. But aid groups say Western journalists, who can look like aid workers, have been injured and killed in Afghanistan and say there is no reason to wait for more incidents.

The issue appeared to be heading for a resolution last month when the Pentagon ordered most soldiers working off base in Afghanistan to shave and wear uniforms.

Soldiers were incensed, noting there is a bounty on the heads of Westerners here. One wore a piece of paper with a bulls eye around his neck to a staff meeting in Kabul as a sign of protest. Another raised it during a town hall-style meeting with visiting Army Secretary Thomas White and was dismissed by White – and later upbraided by a commander.

“I hate wearing a beard, but I don’t want to go home in a body bag,” said one soldier on the Army’s civil affairs team at Bagram, the allies’ main base, in central Afghanistan. He and other soldiers who discussed the issue spoke on condition they not be identified for fear of being punished.

Aid groups say they’re not satisfied with the Pentagon’s efforts. They want military vehicles to be clearly marked, too, and are continuing to push the uniform issue as well as the broader question of military humanitarian work.

“The military should stick to its military function,” said Kevin Henry of CARE, which recently signed a statement with other American and European aid groups that said the increase in humanitarian work by the U.S. military in the past decade in places like Bosnia and East Timor “has been watched with concern by NGOs.”

Military humanitarian workers and academics note that U.S. forces have always done humanitarian projects abroad.

The scope of the projects, however, is growing, they say, in good part because of the desperate need in a place like Afghanistan, where poverty contributed to the country becoming a home to terrorist camps. They also note the projects are good public relations for the military.

Top Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at first spoke openly in defense of soldiers wearing civilian clothes. But since the policy was changed, Pentagon officials have declined to comment about it on the record.

A spokesman at Central Command, the Tampa, Fla.-based headquarters for the military’s war effort, said the policy change was made because “the situation on the ground has changed – security has improved.”

Asked about the complaints from soldiers who say their lives are at risk, Lt. Col. Martin Compton said, “Well, that’s their individual feeling.”

And there’s the underlying conflict.

Henry, the CARE official, said one top Pentagon official with whom aid groups met assured them the military doesn’t want to be deeply in the humanitarian business.

“But we weren’t convinced,” he said.

Northwestern University professor Charlie Moskos, a prominent military sociologist who served in the Army in the 1950s, sees the clash arising from NGOs facing a changed situation.

He said the completely neutral reputation once enjoyed by organizations like the United Nations is gone in Afghanistan. Aid groups are seen as being anti-Taliban and need to work with the military for their own safety, he said.

“The NGOs need protection now; they didn’t need it before. They were seen by all sides as doing good work,” Moskos said.

Moskos and others also think aid groups are worried about competition.

“For NGOs, if this sort of work is being done by the military, where is their funding going to come from?” he said. “It’s turf protection.”

There is a culture clash, too, with each side suspicious of the other.

“It seems that the NGO people place more value on their lives than those of American soldiers,” said a soldier involved in humanitarian projects.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, said in a report about the military’s humanitarian operations, “It seems that the main purpose of these ‘highly visible’ projects is to bolster the approval ratings of the Bush administration.”

“The NGOs and the military are strange bedfellows,” Moskos said. “They come from different cultures, are used to viewing one another with suspicion if not hostility. But now they need to see one another as allies.”