*The 'Security Crank' is a former employee of the Army's Human Terrain System, now working in the bowels of the national security establishment. This is the Crank's first post for Danger Room. *
How do you properly vet the insurgents you’re trying to "win over" to your side? Is simply promising not to attack your forces enough, or should you press for a formal integration with the government? At what point do a militant's activities make him irredeemable?
Those are just some of the difficult choices facing U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan – questions explored in a fine, fine dispatch by the *Washington Post’s *Greg Jaffe. In it, he tells the tale of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Brown, who led a group of soldiers during last year’s insurgent assault on Camp Keating, in Kamdesh district of Nuristan province. After the attack, Lt. Col. Brown faced a difficult choice: whether or not to align himself with a local warlord and militant, Mullah Sadiq, who promised to repel future Taliban attacks.
It seems like the sorts of question were designed to be answered by the Human Terrain System. HTS is the famously controversial U.S. Army program to embed various types of social scientists with Brigade Combat Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ostensibly, these Human Terrain Teams should be out, canvassing the local population to gauge their interests, feelings, and preferences. The local HTT is conspicuously absent from Jaffe’s account of the events following the Kamdesh attack.
Yet the questions Lt. Col. Brown seems desperate to answer—why was Mullah Sadiq first trusted, then distrusted, then blacklisted, and later trusted again by U.S. forces, for example—are the kinds of questions HTTs have answered elsewhere.
Jaffe has indirectly raised similar questions before. In the series he wrote on the Battle of Wanat last year, he highlighted Lt. Col. William Ostlund, who ran the battalion responsible for the Wanat base, as saying some troubling things about the locals. "It was a population I really had a hard time understanding and did not respect," he is quoted as saying. Connecting them to the central government, Ostlund said, “would be the first step to making them better people, less of a threat to themselves.”
There is a HTT active in the area (Wanat and Kamdesh are both in the south of Nuristan, with Kamdesh right along the eastern border with Pakistan). They were an active presence at Brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, and several of their personnel spent the majority of their time working these remote valleys to help soldiers get a better handle on social relationships and the general zeitgeist.
The HTT is conspicuously absent from Jaffe’s account of the Battle of Wanat as well. Lt. Col. Ostlund is not the only person in this story to write off everyone in the area as contemptible jackasses — Lt. Bromstrom, Jaffe’s main character, who died trying to rescue his men from the observation post above Want, said something similar. When his father asked him how he knew the people he bombed were bad guys or just locals burying their dead, Bromstrom replied, “They are all [expletive] Taliban up there.”
It is possible Jaffe simply didn’t know enough to ask about it—HTTs are not exactly high profile, despite an entrenched resistance to the project from some parts of academia. But it’s also possible the HTT just wasn’t involved in the broad events of their area, which is perhaps most worrying of all.
The recent complex attack on Bagram Air Field raises similarly troubling questions. As Nathan highlighted, "it suggests that insurgents were able to move around the communities near Bagram, perhaps relying on local supporters." Rumors abound in the villages surrounding Bagram: lots of people think it a conspiracy they only get occasional electricity while the base has more than it knows what to do with. Some villages see ISAF patrols, at most, a few times a month. In 2009, bazaar merchants—the Friday bazaar inside the base, not the larger one outside the gates most Bagram residents cannot visit—darkly hinted that any Parwani had to pay a substantial bribe, thousands of dollars, just to get a job on the base.
In theory, the HTTs would able to offer advice and informed analysis to the various commanders making decisions about how to relate to these communities. Often, the commanders don’t even know enough to ask, and in at least a few cases, the HTTs don’t know how to “pitch” their services. As events in Nuristan indicate, even if there is an HTT in the area, their advice could fall on deaf ears. Worse still: if they are deliberately or even unintentionally excluded from the very process they were deployed to influence—then HTS as a whole is facing a much more serious problem: just what, exactly, are they expected to do?
It is a strategic issue HTS itself hasn’t seemed to work out. Nowhere in its documents can one find any firm doctrine (pdf) on how they should be used by Brigade commanders. And indeed, that was initially sold as its strength: the teams would be flexible enough to be used however a commander felt they could be most effective. But what if a commander sees no need for them? What if, as Lt. Col. Ostlund said, he felt no need to understand the people of his area? What if the teams themselves have no reliable way to pass along the information they collect?
These are the existential questions few seem willing to answer within the program. However good an idea it may be, if the commanders on the ground either don’t know how or refuse to utilize its components, it’s worth questioning what HTS’ purpose really is. In the case of Nuristan, it seems clear that tighter integration with the human terrain team could have possibly prevented some needless deaths, and at the very least helped commanders wrap their heads around what to do in the surrounding communities immediately afterward. But if HTTs aren’t doing their jobs, why are they even there?
[Photo: U.S. Army]
See Also:
- 'Oil Spot Spock' and the Human Terrain Team
- Military to Deploy Social Scientists to Africa
- Army Researchers: Why the Kandahar Offensive Could Backfire
- Army Researchers Warn Against Tribal War in Afghanistan
- Army: Battle Taliban With… Saffron?
- 'Human Terrain' Probes Iran's Influence in Afghanistan
- Army Social Scientists Calm Afghanistan, Make Enemies at Home
- Third 'Human Terrain' Researcher Dead
