When the Navy doctor had finished: “Women would not respond to questions regarding community issues, even when such questions were framed by HTT as simply an inquiry into their personal opinions and experiences,” she wrote in her patrol report. “When pressed . . . interviewees said simply, ‘We are not comfortable answering any questions.’ ” Cardinalli, “Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF-6 Patrol Report and Findings,” August 18, 2009.
But this concern struck Cardinalli: Ibid.
She had no medical training: Like others on her team, Cardinalli had taken part in a brief combat lifesaving course during her Human Terrain System training cycle. I have taken two similar courses myself, but I am profoundly unqualified to hand out medicine to Afghans.
He later told me he was from Nad Ali: Also known as Nad-i-Ali.
The Afghans were growing vegetables in the sewage runoff from the nearby military bases: Marine Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Naler made a reference to the runoff during a briefing to the Marine commander, General Larry Nicholson, on September 13, 2009: “They’re all competing, quite frankly now for the same fertilizer, and that is commonly referred to as shit creek coming out of Bastion. That is what is fueling their agrarian society all the way down the central wadi.”
AF7 had arrived at the beginning of a long-awaited troop surge: In Helmand and most of the south, the Afghan postal service hadn’t worked in any dependable way since before the civil war. “Night letters,” however, are mentioned with some frequency in press accounts.
Cardinalli had handed out Icy Hot: Afghanistan had the second-highest maternal mortality rate according to United Nations figures issued in 2008 and 2009. Sayed Salahuddin, “Maternal Mortality Rate High in Afghanistan: UN,” http://in.reuters.com/article/2009/01/26/afghan-mortality-idINISL40747920090126, accessed July 23, 2012. The number has since declined; see “Efforts Intensify to Reach MDGs on Maternal Health,” United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, April 11, 2012, http://unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?tabid=12254&ctl=Details&mid=15756&ItemID=33617&language=en-US, accessed July 23, 2012.
Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill McCollough: McCollough commanded the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, in Nawa. The area was repeatedly held up by the military as a shining example of what good counterinsurgency tactics could accomplish. See Gezari, “Talking to the Enemy: How One Company of Marines Is Helping to Bring Afghan Insurgents Home,” Slate, October 16, 2009.
They landed 180 times in thirty-seven countries: U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940), 2–7.
A Marine Corps intelligence officer had to know the enemy: Ibid., 19.
That is a much broader definition of intelligence: The Army’s definition of intelligence has been evolving these last few years as a result of its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. A comparison between the 2004 and 2010 versions of Army intelligence doctrine is illuminating. The 2004 edition of U.S. Army Field Manual 2-0: Intelligence describes intelligence as a means of combating threats within a commander’s battlespace and is overwhelmingly focused on the enemy. The word enemy occurs 242 times in the 2004 manual, compared with only 130 times in the 2010 version. Although both manuals state that a key purpose of intelligence is to drive a commander’s “decisionmaking,” the 2010 manual devotes considerable attention to “civil considerations” as a key aspect of understanding the battlefield. In the 2004 version, relatively little attention is paid to “open source intelligence” (OSINT), which receives its own chapter in the 2010 update. This addition to the concept of intelligence coincided with the advent of the Human Terrain System and similar initiatives, and Steve Fondacaro and others at the Human Terrain System have argued that the program played an important role in forcing the Army to revise and broaden its definition of intelligence. The only mentions of “culture” in the 2004 manual come in subsections on intelligence support to psychological operations, linguistics, and stability operations. In the section on stability operations, which gives the fullest treatment of the importance of culture, only one sentence is devoted to the consequences of failing to understand it: “A lack of knowledge concerning local politics, customs, and culture could lead to US actions which attack inappropriate targets or which may offend or cause mistrust among the local population.” In the 2010 revision, by contrast, the word culture occurs more than twenty times in the context of culture as an important element of the population or the Army itself (compared with only five occurrences in the 2004 edition). “Culture is a key factor in understanding the local population,” the 2010 manual states. “Cultural awareness has become an increasingly important competency for intelligence Soldiers. Culture is the shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts members of a society use to cope with the world and each other. . . . Understanding other cultures applies to all operations, not only those dominated by stability.” (Emphasis is mine.) In the 2010 manual, the sentence about the consequence of failing to understand cultural variables has been expanded to read: “A lack of knowledge concerning insurgents, local politics, customs, and culture as well as how to differentiate between local combatants, often leads to U.S. actions that can result in unintended and disadvantageous consequences—such as attacking unsuitable targets or offending or causing mistrust among the local population. This lack of knowledge could potentially threaten mission accomplishment.” U.S. Army Field Manual 2-0: Intelligence, May 17, 2004, and U.S. Army Field Manual 2-0: Intelligence, March 23, 2010.
A few months before my visit to Helmand: Major Ben Connable, U.S. Marine Corps, “All Our Eggs in a Broken Basket: How the Human Terrain System Is Undermining Sustainable Military Cultural Competence,” Military Review, March–April 2009, 57–64.
Cardinalli’s report on homosexuality among Pashtun men: A Marine intelligence sergeant in Helmand, Afghanistan, interview by author, September 20, 2009.
That fall, a Marine officer asked Lacy: Lacy, interview by author, November 18, 2009.
In a September 30 field report, Lacy detailed: Lacy, “Human Terrain Team (AF6) INTSUM 30 September 2009 Re: Marjeh.”
This was not the sort of cultural information: Phoenix was a Vietnam War–era intelligence program focused on understanding the social and political organization of the Viet Cong, with the aim of killing and capturing its leaders and sympathizers. See among others Nathan Hodge, Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 125–28.
“They have a hard time, any of these guys”: Lacy, interview by author, November 18, 2009. The Marine colonel who supervised the Human Terrain Team was so impressed by what Lacy was able to gather from the Afghan police sergeant and other internally displaced Afghans in Lashkar Gah that “he said, ‘Stop what you’re doing. I want you to do this. Because even our intel guys can’t get good information about this place,’ ” Lacy told me. “That’s part of what [the colonel] liked so much about it, it was stuff he could use for operations. . . . This whole idea in the program is that we’re going to make this huge distinction with intel, not intel, blah, blah, blah, but the lines are so blurred. I’m one of the few people that openly calls it ‘open-source intelligence.’ HTS just freaks out when you use the term intel because they think it’s a bad word, or it’s going to frighten away their PhDs, and I don’t care. If that frightens them away, then they shouldn’t be here.”
By late 2009, the American Anthropological Association: American Anthropological Association Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC), “Final Report on the Army’s Human Terrain System Proof of Concept Program,” October 14, 2009, 49–51.
a number of anthropologists in good standing: See “Moving Forward with the CEAUSSIC: Ethics Casebook: What is the Casebook, and Why Now?” http://blog.aaanet.org/2010/01/27/ceaussic-ethics-casebook/, accessed September 5, 2012.
It wasn’t working for the military: “As a security paradigm may come to modify or even replace the older one of [sic] devel
oped during the Cold War, the question of engagement, non-engagement, or even anti-anti-engagement which the Commission began by taking up will seem even more naive than it does now,” the CEAUSSIC members wrote. “The challenge will increasingly be to define ethically defensible research in complex environments of collaboration.” AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the Security and Intelligence Communities, “Final Report,” November 4, 2007, 8.
Rob Albro, an anthropologist at American University: Rob Albro, interview by author, December 4, 2009. “In a very real sense, our reluctance to engage with institutions that make us uncomfortable—military or corporate—means that anthropologists are missing an opportunity to educate policymakers about how our discipline has evolved,” Albro and his colleagues had written. “Final Report,” 2007, 22.
The Human Terrain System lied: Fondacaro told me that he didn’t identify what the Human Terrain System did as “intelligence” because the “social science community” believed intelligence was “anything that helps the Army kill people better. . . . I want us in the Department of Defense to see intelligence as something that’s greater-expanded, that captures HTS. . . . I think intelligence has become more like Human Terrain. I think we’ve driven that.” Fondacaro, interview by author, June 16, 2010; emphasis is mine.
Within a few months of my visit to Helmand: “L—— Formal Performance Counseling, 17 February 2010”; “Developmental Counseling Form for ——,” U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, October 15, 2009; and “Request for Termination of ——; Based on Poor Performance and Lack of Professionalism,” Program Manager Forward, Afghanistan.
One of her teammates, a Vietnam veteran, was sent home: A Human Terrain System official, interview by author, March 24, 2010.
By February 2010, the Marine colonel: Email correspondence between a Marine officer and a Human Terrain System official, February 18, 2010. I focus on the dysfunction in Helmand because those teams stood at the heart of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, and because I spent time with many of their members. Such antics were not confined to Helmand. During some twelve weeks I spent with Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan between the spring of 2009 and the fall of 2010, I also met a handful of smart, hardworking people who managed to commit useful acts of cultural and political analysis and avoid being strangled by the bureaucracy.
Soon after, the military wanted twenty-six teams: McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010. Other quotes from McFate in this paragraph come from the same interview.
The first is its frankness: The paper begins: “Conducting military operations in a low-intensity conflict without ethnographic and cultural intelligence is like building a house without using your thumbs: it is a wasteful, clumsy, and unnecessarily slow process at best, with a high probability for frustration and failure.” Kipp et al., “The Human System: A CORDS for the 21st Century,” 8. The word intelligence appears twelve times in the paper, while the word anthropologist is used only three times.
As the people who ultimately ran the Human Terrain System: The program’s job descriptions would change significantly as it evolved. For a full accounting, see Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 76–85. As McFate told me: “Ideally you’d like everyone to have served in a military unit, have a PhD in the social sciences, speak the local language, and have [done] fieldwork in that particular place. If you were waiting for those people to knock on your door, we would still be waiting, because there are just not enough of them in the U.S., especially given the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq have been more or less closed to researchers for decades now. So the goal was never actually to just look for people who had experience as social scientists working in those domains, ’cause you’re simply not going to find them.” McFate, interview by author, January 28, 2009. Emphasis is mine.
The article was not shy about the need for intelligence skills: Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. “Our original idea—it didn’t prove feasible—was to use reservists with the language and anthropological skills,” Kipp told me. “And my vision was flawed here, because I figured we’d get time to do a small test concept and it wouldn’t grow [so] much. . . . I did not anticipate when I wrote that article that we would do the surge and create the immediate demand that we did. . . . My vision was what we’d done with Foreign Area Officers, which was to get them area background, deep language.” Kipp is a historian, and the prominence of anthropology in the Human Terrain System had not been his idea. That was McFate’s contribution, he told me, but Kipp seemed to understand the potential conflicts better than she did. “Montgomery is a hybrid,” Kipp told me. “She’s a lawyer and an anthropologist. She’s never taught anthropology at a university. She was not particularly sensitive to academic turf. And an anthropologist who has done thorough research has certain things he’s saying, ‘I’m not doing.’ ”
During his fourth rotation in late 2009: Colonel Mike Howard, interview by author, December 20, 2009.
In January 2010, Flynn published a paper: Major General Michael T. Flynn, Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor, “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” Center for a New American Security, January 2010, 4–17. One would think it would have been harder for the Human Terrain System to deny its role in the intelligence cycle when the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan exhorted analysts to gather information from Human Terrain Teams, yet the program’s official position did not immediately change.
More than eight years into the war: Ibid., 7.
Human Terrain Teams could help solve these problems: Flynn, interview by author, January 16, 2010. This dissonance—between what senior officers saw or said they saw in the Human Terrain Teams and what I and other observers saw on the ground—is borne out by the Center for Naval Analyses report, which found that brigade commanders and other “customers” of the program, “including those most critical of HTS, indicated that HTS teams are performing a vital function” and “contend that even if only a few of the teams are successful, the good work that the successful teams do is so important that it makes the whole enterprise worthwhile.” Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 103, and Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming 2013.
McFate and Fondacaro had told me that their recruitment: Fondacaro, interview by author, June 16, 2010. The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command had a broad contract with BAE, and because the Human Terrain System fell under the intelligence section of that command, the program was stuck with BAE as a hiring contractor, Fondacaro told me. “We were constantly forced into an omnibus contract that exclusively favored BAE, and we were unable to get quality performance standards out of the contract,” he said. “I get an eighty-six-year-old Iraqi guy. He’s eighty-six years old and he’s never used a computer in his life. And he’s showing up as a team member. He can barely walk! And I’m saying, ‘Oh my God, take this guy away from here, you’re wasting our time.’ Then I’m told by TRADOC I have to write a statement stating why he doesn’t fit. I’ve got a woman who shows up and it turns out she’s got pornographic pictures on the Internet of herself. There’s a guy who shows up, he looks very good, he’s an Iraqi . . . and we discover he has prior service with the Iraqi intelligence service. This individual was not picked up in the clearance process. We had to bring him back to the U.S. His clearance was being handled by another agency that wasn’t talking to our agency.” In December 2010, Fondacaro told Wired’s Danger Room blog that “[t]hirty to forty percent of the people [in the Human Terrain System] were not qualified.” Spencer Ackerman, “Hundreds in Army Social Science Unqualified, Former Boss Says,” Wired: Danger Room, December 21, 2010, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/human-terrain-unqualified/, accessed July 25, 2012.
Convinced that the project’s failures stemmed: There is evidence that Fondacaro and McFate were correct about the BAE contract, and that
ultimate responsibility for many of the program’s shortcomings lay with the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. In 2009, citing “anecdotal evidence indicating problems with management and resourcing” in the Human Terrain System, the House Armed Services Committee asked the Defense Department to conduct an independent assessment of the program. The assessment, undertaken by the Center for Naval Analyses and published in the fall of 2010, paints a picture of TRADOC as understaffed and uncooperative, and suggests that “some of these unresolved issues may require a reassessment of where the HTS program resides. . . . [T]here may be a lack of TRADOC institutional commitment to making HTS a success.” The report notes that TRADOC’s contract with BAE, worth $380 million, included few protections for the government, and that it was renewed in 2009, despite Fondacaro’s complaints. Human Terrain Team members were hired on the basis of a phone or online interview, and BAE’s rejection rate was remarkably low. In fiscal year 2009, more than half of those who applied for a job on a Human Terrain Team got one; the following year, some 40 percent did. While some were removed during training, many stayed on, for there were no tests or other measures of competency during the program’s four-and-a-half-month training period. BAE, for its part, complained that the program didn’t give its contractors enough lead time to find qualified recruits. An in-person interview with potential recruits would have tested “the candidate’s ability to interact with people—likely an important attribute for someone going to a foreign country and attempting to ‘map’ the human terrain,” the authors of the study noted dryly. But BAE estimated that such an interview would cost about one thousand dollars more per candidate and the contractor “had no incentive to spend the additional money.” The authors of the study were not able to look at the contract, but they noted that it apparently contained no “penalties for providing substandard recruits or incentives for providing good recruits. The government seems to have to take whatever BAE provides. . . . In our judgment, the contract needs to be modified to provide more protection for the government.” Moreover, the study finds significant grounds that TRADOC did not properly review or oversee its contract with BAE. Unsurprisingly, the study found that the Human Terrain System suffered from crippling attrition rates and that “many of the currently deployed HTS personnel are underqualified for their jobs.” Clinton et al., “Congressionally Directed Assessment of the Human Terrain System,” 3, 6, 86–93, 106–9, 135–37.
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