ROBERT YOUNG PELTON goes deep inside America’s new, brainier strategy in Afghanistan and finds that, on the front line, scientists and soldiers don’t always mix. An absurdist tale of modern warfare.

 

Read the U.S. Army’s response to this article, and the author’s response to the Army, here.
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The portal to America’s war on terror is gate three at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan, a six-and-a-half-square-mile blast-wall fortress surrounded by a wasteland of dust. From inside, up a long alley of concrete barriers and out of the haze, comes the visual equivalent of space aliens: flak-jacketed, helmeted, sunglassed, digital-camo-wearing National Guardsmen from Mississippi, who motion for me to get into their air-conditioned white SUV. We soon pull up to a plywood shack, where I hope to get my first look at America’s latest instrument of warfare: anthropologists.

A lady press officer is professionally happy to see us. “We didn’t even know what a ‘human terrain team’ was until you called,” she chirps as another soldier carefully cleans the Afghani dust out of her nose with rolled-up Kleenex. Then she adds, kindergarten-teacher style, “You are helping us to learn about these people.”

The idea behind human terrain teams, or HTTs, is to put a small army of civilian social scientists (ideally anthropologists) and intel-savvy military officers into the field to give brigade commanders a better understanding of local dynamics. The teams are charged with “mapping” social structures, linkages, and priorities, just as a recon team might map physical terrain. By talking to locals the teams might help identify which village elder the commander should deal with or which tribe might be a waste of time; which valley should get a roads project and whether a new road might create a dispute between villages. It’s all part of General David Petraeus’s doctrine of a smarter, management-style counterinsurgency.

There are now six five-to-nine-person human terrain teams in Afghanistan and 21 teams in Iraq. If the concept proves successful, the $120 million–plus program would grow to 700 HTT and support staff in those countries and other hot spots. The man charged with managing the program is retired special operations colonel Steve Fondacaro. He is so passionate about it that when I interviewed him back in the States, he held forth for nine hours straight. Seven hours in, he walked into a door, breaking his jaw, but resumed talking. Fondacaro freely admits that one of the biggest obstacles to injecting social science into the military will be the military itself. “We are like a virus infecting the host,” he told me. “Either the army will be inoculated and be stronger, or they will expel us in a torrent of puke.”

Already there have been problems. The academic community has been critical of giving traditionally “do no harm” anthros combat uniforms and letting them carry guns. It hasn’t helped Fondacaro’s recruiting efforts that in the past nine months two HTT civilian scientists have been killed on the job, one in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq. Another HTT scientist was booted from the program after joking that if America invaded Iran she might “switch sides.”

“We are like a virus. Either the army will be inoculated, or they will expel us in a torrent of puke,” says the HTT program manager.

Still, getting a handle on the human landscape made a dramatic difference in Iraq. It helped Petraeus and his Ph.D. cadre convert enemies into allies, recasting a conflict that looked as if it would drag on for decades into one that could essentially be over within a year. Now the white-hot center of the war on terror is once again Afghanistan. U.S. forces there gets 20 “tics” a day — or Troops in Contact with the enemy — compared with one or two in Iraq.

But Afghanistan is not Iraq. It’s a fractious nation whose dirt-poor people are scattered mostly outside of cities, across a harsh landscape of deserts and mountains, making it much harder to win hearts and minds. This is a country, remember, that some of the most daunting forces in modern history — the Russians, the British, and now the Americans — have been unable to conquer. The recent refrain from even our own retired generals is that not only are we losing the war, but we don’t even know what’s going on there.

So could Fondacaro and his army of eggheads solve this? That’s what I’d come here to find out. But what I would get over the next two weeks would be a much larger, more bizarre, and in many ways more disturbing glimpse of what happens when 21st-century warfare is waged in a Third World country.

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Before I can get started, though, the military has to actually locate its own human terrain team, and right now the folks in Bagram are having some trouble with that. So after checking into my bunkhouse, a “hooch” cheerfully labeled “Hotel California,” I go for a stroll on base to kill time.

Bagram is on the site of an old Soviet air base, which long before that was the camping spot of Alexander the Great. The American version is a massive dust-blown shanty and trailer-town city of 18,000 soldiers and contractors. It is a war-fighting support hub, an air base, ops center, insurgent prison, and one of the more zealously regulated sites in Afghanistan. Notices and signs, rules and warnings are posted on every wall. Military police use radar guns to catch speeders, and uniform standards are imposed in a grim fury that would make the Taliban jealous. Our little outpost of freedom is the kind of place where there are carefully typed notices telling you how to use the numbered toilet stalls (“for a good flush put your paper on top”) and what to do if you need to take a leak (“don’t forget to lift the seat first”).

There are many tribes at Bagram. The dominant ones are easily identifiable by their digital camo, bad haircuts, and guns banging against their butts even in the chow hall. The other main tribe, the contractors, are recognizable by their Fu Manchu mustaches, Realtree camo, and crushed KBR baseball caps. These groups are augmented by an invisible population of about 600 prisoners. The only Afghans we spy during our Burger King, DQ, and Subway meals are those who clean tables and scrub toilets.

My first night in the Afghan countryside is made more exotic by the sound of the amplified Jazzercise instructor yelling encouragement from inside a giant inflatable tent, and I am pleased to find that despite the Taliban’s best efforts at instilling modesty in Afghanistan, premium cable is available for $115 a month here and massages from young Kyrgyz ladies for $15. Bagram is America’s duty-free space station in the war on terror and may be the most culturally isolated outpost on the planet. The world’s most effective killing machine has ensconced itself in a hastily constructed replica of a Midwest strip mall.

The press office eventually finds the human terrain team of Task Force Warrior sitting literally across the street in a cramped 15-by-25-foot makeshift building. The team’s own terrain is filled with laptops, maps, pens, notebooks, and cluttered desks. The unit consists of one social scientist, three research managers, an IT guy, and three translators, or “terps.”

The scientist, Jim, is easy to identify as he is the one who begs not to his have his photo taken or last name used. It seems that within left-leaning academic circles, hanging out with the military is the equivalent of a movie star doing infomercials. He’s a 50-something anthro who worked in Afghanistan two decades ago but seems more preoccupied with the subject of how unique the genetic makeup of Laotians is. (According to one of the research managers, the scientist spends much of his time in Kabul and has authored exactly three reports: “one on Ramadan, the Muslim holiday; another on funerals; and some other on Afghan and Islamic influences.”)

Two of the research managers are reserve officers, and the other is an ex-soldier who served in Kurdish areas of Iraq. Of the two civilian interpreters, one describes himself as “Persian,” which I take to mean that he’s a Shia Iranian-American working in an environment mostly hostile to Shias, and the other, Gulam, is an Afghan mechanic from Colorado who hasn’t been here since he left in the ’70s.