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exactly, they were supposed to do their job, whom they were supposed to report to, and how they fit in with the overall mission.
    Coulter later recalled that the discussion got Armitage fired up. He had served three combat tours in Vietnam as a patrol boat officer and advisor to the South Vietnamese navy. Within a week, he instructed Coulter to pack his bags for Afghanistan, where he would be the eyes and ears for Armitage. Armitage’s advice: “Don’t spend a single night in Kabul; hitchhike around the country with our staff.” Coulter’s initial title was “roving PRT person.”
    The problem was, getting around Afghanistan was not easy. At that point the State Department still had few people stationed outside Kabul, and the embassy usually depended on the military to ferry its personnel to remote outposts. Even though Coulter was relatively senior, he had a difficult time following Armitage’s directive. Eventually he found a solution. In spring 2004, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Eric Olson, took over as the head of Combined Joint Task Force-76. Coulter was essentially seconded to Olson as a political advisor, and in return, he had authority to hop around the country on military aircraft. It was, to use State Department slang, a classic bureaucratic “drug deal.”
    By autumn 2004 the U.S. military wanted to expand the number of PRTs around the country. The plan was to gradually hand over control of PRTs to NATO, starting with the teams in the relatively stable and secure northeastern portions of Afghanistan and then moving around the map counterclockwise. It was part of the exit strategy: As NATO took control, this would presumably free up more U.S. forces that were desperately needed in Iraq. But Coulter discovered that the NATO allies were not always enthusiastic about the PRT mission. In northern Kunduz Province, he found, the Germans were extremely risk-averse. They allowed the Provincial Reconstruction team members to leave the camp only if they could be accompanied by armored ambulances; night patrols were rare; and the Germans were bound by restrictive rules (called “caveats”) that prevented them from taking part in combat unless they were under direct attack. That approach created a security void that insurgents would soon fill.
    In early October 2004, I paid a visit to Kunduz, where about 280 German soldiers were stationed along with a handful of U.S. government civilians and about a dozen U.S. soldiers. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Scheibe, spokesman for PRT Kunduz, made it eminently clear to me that the Germans were not eager to work outside the wire, emphasizing that basic security was the job of local police. “We are part of ISAF,” Scheibe told me. “Security assistance force.”
    But that attitude was problematic. A month earlier, in September 2004, the city of Faizabad, in the remote northeastern province of Badakhshan, had been the scene of a riot. Fired by rumors that local women had been sexually assaulted by foreigners, local men had burned down the offices of two foreign aid agencies in the town, where fifty-five members of the PRT Kunduz had recently established a security contingent. Around a dozen German soldiers were working at the airport when the riots began. Hoping to consolidate his forces, the German commander ordered the team members back to base but they couldn’t get away. When the German troops reached the town, they ran straight into the rioters. “They stopped immediately and saw about a thousand people. The street was full,” Scheibe told me. “And they were not friendly-looking … so [the German soldiers] decided to go back another way.”
    After beating an initial retreat, the German commander led a team out to do some reconnoitering. By then the riot was over; it all ended when a local Afghan commander threatened to shoot rioters. Several aid workers were beaten,