Wired brings news of the latest counter-insurgency innovation from the US Army – ‘Human Terrain Teams’. Some creative thinking about influence is underway:
Each team is getting a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish and software for social network analysis, so they can diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic and tribal landscape.
Wired explains that “the idea behind HTTs is to take what a brigade already knows about the local population and combine it with social-science research, to produce a sense of how the society around them really works”. The Army has set aside $41 million with which to deploy 150 “social scientists, software geeks and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year”. Six such teams are already on the ground.
However, some anthropologists are up in arms about their academic brethren using their skills to help the US Army:
The executive board of the American Anthropology Association, or AAA, recently blasted the HTT program as immoral. Because anthropologists in the effort could help in “identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations,” the board wrote, information derived from the program “would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed.”
But on the other hand, Wired continues, some of the early results look impressive:
A “preliminary assessment” of the first HTT, obtained by Wired News, shows the potential impact these social-science groups can make. In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.
“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.'”
At the HTT’s suggestions, the brigade also invited the province’s head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. The religious leader was so moved by the gesture, he recorded radio ads denouncing the Taliban.
Let’s be honest, we’ve heard enough ‘we’ve found the counter-insurgency grail!’ stories over the last few years to warrant a cautious approach to claims like these. Still, as Wired makes clear, the HTTs are already proving to be a useful analytical tool for understanding the culture of a fundamentally backward – some would say essentially medieval – people: colonels in the US Army. Two HTT members found that their first task was to draft a memo complaining about the colonel in charge of their team:
…a military man, not a social scientist – who [they] said had a distinct “disinterest in the Iraqi population, society and culture. He often uses the terms ‘Arab,’ ‘Iraqi,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Sunni,’ or ‘Shia’ interchangeably…. At times, he has even made comments such as ‘when in doubt, kill ’em all.’
