Stabilization and
Reconstruction in Afghanistan: Are PRTs a Model or a Muddle?

On 7 October 2001, a US-led military coalition launched Operation Enduring Freedom against Afghanistan's Taliban government, toppling it after just two months of fighting. United Nations Security Council resolution 1386 established an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on 20 December 2001 to help the Afghan Interim Authority maintain security in and around Kabul. In light of ISAF's relative success, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, UN officials, and others soon called for ISAF to expand its operations into the provinces. US officials were not interested, however, believing that a traditional peacekeeping approach would be ineffective in Afghanistan. US allies were unwilling to deploy large numbers of troops to patrol Afghanistan's remote cities and towns. A 2003 RAND study noted there were initially 18 to 20 peacekeepers per thousand people in Bosnia and Kosovo. (1) To achieve such a ratio in Afghanistan would have required deploying hundreds of thousands of troops in a country that has been historically wary of a heavy foreign presence. During the summer of 2002, US officials developed the concept of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to spread the "ISAF effect," without expanding ISAF itself. First established in early 2003, PRTs consisted of 60 to 100 soldiers plus, eventually, Afghan advisors and representatives from civilian agencies like the US State Department, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department of Agriculture. PRTs have the potential to become a model for future stabilization and reconstruction operations. Representatives from more than a dozen countries are now participating in 22 PRTs to enhance security, reconstruction, and the reach of the Afghan central government. PRTs have achieved great success in building support for the US-led coalition and respect for the Afghan government. They have played important roles in everything from election support to school-building to disarmament to mediating factional conflicts. Despite their potential and record of success, however, PRTs always have been a bit of a muddle. Inconsistent mission statements, unclear roles and responsibilities, ad hoc preparation, and, most important, limited resources have confused potential partners and prevented PRTs from having a greater effect on Afghanistan's future. (2) This article will first review the strategic context in which PRTs operate, namely stabilization and reconstruction operations. Second, it will describe the PRT concept and its history. Third, the article will assess the success of the PRTs against three criteria: coordination, relationship-building, and capacity-building. Enhancing local security is also a key measure of success, but as this article will discuss, PRTs achieve this goal primarily through their relationships and capacity-building efforts. The assessments in this article are based only on broad observations and discussions. They are not meant as definitive judgments but rather as a starting point for thinking about how to make such assessments more rigorous in the future. Finally, the article will conclude with some recommendations for how the PRTs should evolve in Afghanistan and how the PRTs can be a model for future operations. Stabilization and Reconstruction The US Marine Corps' draft Small Wars manual observes: "Military planners might choose to consider the initial conventional combat phase as the shaping phase, rather than the decisive phase. [I]f our political objectives can only be accomplished after a successful stability phase, then the stability phase is, de facto, the decisive phase. " (3) Events in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate that the stability phase of war is often more challenging than the combat phase. America's inability to achieve its goals in both countries more quickly has sparked much-needed debates about how America and the world should prepare for and conduct stabilization and reconstruction (S&R) activities. …