Jan 22, 2009 2:00 PM

Indiana Jones and the Talky-Talky Team

The U.S. Army’s controversial Human Terrain System is supposed to be at the leading edge of 21st-Century warfare. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military wants to use the tools of ethnographic research to conduct smarter and less lethal counterinsurgency campaigns; in Africa, it wants to tap cultural expertise for conflict prevention. That, at least, is […]

The U.S. Army's controversial Human Terrain System is supposed to be at the leading edge of 21st-Century warfare. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the military wants to use the tools of ethnographic research to conduct smarter and less lethal counterinsurgency campaigns; in Africa, it wants to tap cultural expertise for conflict prevention.

That, at least, is the theory. In the latest issue of Men's Journal, author and filmmaker Robert Young Pelton hits the road with a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan. What he discovers is at turns hilarious, informative -- and highly disturbing.

After arriving at Bagram Air Base -- an American mini-mall transplanted to eastern Parwan province -- Pelton hooks up with a Human Terrain Team composed of a Laotian DNA expert, a Chinese-speaking former intel analyst, an ex-infantry type and an Afghan-American auto mechanic. He then hitches a ride with Lt. Jeremy Jones, a former Cheesecake Factory waiter from Indiana now employed as a research manager for the program. Jones, pictured here, is the friendly face of military anthropology: His team claims to have reduced "kinetic" (i.e., lethal) operations in their region by 40 to 60 percent, and Jones comes off as a well-meaning researcher.

Along the way, Pelton also runs into another kind of human terrain mapping effort: a small team of men, laden with weapons and gear, who snatch Afghans and interrogate them to help fill out an expanding human intelligence database. Asked to explain the difference between their mission and that of Jones' cultural research team, one of the team members tells Pelton: "I s'pose we are the shooty-shooty guys rather than the talky-talky guys." This, it seems, is the underside of the military's enthusiasm for mapping social networks, real Heart of Darkness stuff.

Go read the whole thing, now.

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