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political situation in Ghazni. Eventually, Mongan had to send e-mail from the PRT commander’s account and call his superiors in Kabul to make sure some of his reports got through to the embassy. Other Foreign Service officers serving on PRTs encountered the same problem.
    And then there was the issue of whether the civilians should be armed. Both the military and the State Department were ambivalent. This was, after all, a relatively small and isolated military outpost, and everyone needed to pitch in to provide security. But no one was clear on whether the civilians on the PRT should also carry weapons. Mongan and the other civilian members of the PRT traveled with the military on patrols, sometimes going into the city of Ghazni to meet up with some of the local government officials, sometimes driving out to rural districts. About once a month the PRT members would load up their vehicles and form a convoy for a five-day patrol to some of the more remote areas of the province. Most of the districts were pretty secure, but about four districts were marked red on the map. The PRT commander wanted everyone carrying a weapon whenever they went there.
    The embassy did not want Foreign Service officers openly carrying weapons, but maintained something of a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. And if having Foreign Service personnel carrying pistols and carbines made State Department officials uneasy, it didn’t please some military commanders either. Mongan once attended a brigade commanders’ conference where a State Department employee arrived with a pistol strapped to his hip, raising a few eyebrows among the military men in the room. Another Foreign Service officer on a PRT showed a bit more chutzpah. Whenever he showed up at the embassy he would leave his pistol in his truck, but he would come walking into the embassy with the empty holster still strapped to his thigh.
    Despite the bureaucratic ambiguities, Mongan loved working on the PRT. It was “the best job of my life,” he later told me. He was living at a combat outpost, free of the dull certainties of embassy life; he enjoyed a good working relationship with the other civilians on the team; and his commander had a clear grasp of the mission. He discarded the DCM’s cautious advice, and became closely involved in overseeing local projects. Like Michelle Parker, he discovered that a relatively junior officer had real power on a PRT. As he later recalled, “The embassy tends to have a very conventional outlook. And when they said ‘Don’t try to be a player,’ what they meant is ‘Keep us informed on what’s going on, and don’t try to get involved in it.’ The problem is, of course, most diplomats being diplomats, and not physicists, don’t know what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is. You can’t passively report on something—if you’re in the room, you’re influencing it! And you may as well influence the shit out if it instead of influencing it passively. And there were a couple of times … where I probably got in front of myself. But at a certain point the embassy was willing to trust me to go ahead with what I thought was a good idea.”
    Like Parker, he was hooked. But at that point the PRTs were still an obscure experiment in militarizing aid and development.
    Despite those first hesitant steps toward creating a cadre of muddy-boots diplomats, there was a sense within the Bush administration that the State Department was still not pulling its weight in nation building. In early 2004, Michael Coulter, a Republican political appointee within the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, had a conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the apparent lack of State Department commitment to the civilian reconstruction mission. The PRTs seemed like a worthwhile experiment, but there were no standard guidelines for how,