by Nathan Hodge
The military’s culture of secrecy clashed with the more free-spirited world of academia. Human Terrain research was supposed to draw from “open source” rather than classified information, but the teams worked inside military headquarters, a sensitive environment filled with classified maps, monitors, and equipment. The job required, at a minimum, a “secret” clearance; candidates would preferably obtain a “top secret” clearance. Background checks for a top-secret clearance are intrusive; they also require “cleared” individuals to sign what are, in effect, nondisclosure agreements. That kind of restriction could be a potential problem for an academic who was interested in writing and publishing freely. And it could also be an obstacle for social science researchers who traveled widely and had a great range of foreign contacts.
Such was the case with Zenia Helbig, a graduate student at the University of Virginia who joined the Human Terrain program in 2006. Helbig was in many ways an ideal hire. She was a student of religious violence in the Muslim world, particularly in Shia communities, and her research had taken her twice to Iran, where she had briefly met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the mayor of Tehran. Despite her travel to an “Axis of Evil” state, Helbig managed to receive an interim clearance. But she was suspended from the program after cracking a joke over a beer in a base parking lot during an exercise at Fort Hood, Texas (“Okay, if we invade Iran, that’s where I draw the line, hop the border and switch sides,” she recalls saying). Stripped of her clearance, Helbig became unable to work in any national security-related program.20
The Human Terrain System offered extremely lucrative pay packages, particularly for academics. The typical base salary for a Human Terrain Team member was around $115,000; when combined with hardship pay and other incentives for serving in a war zone, the take-home pay for a team member could climb as high as $300,000.21 But the Army still had trouble recruiting. Part of the issue was professional resistance. In 2007, a group of anthropologists organized an ad hoc group called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. They lobbied their colleagues to sign a pledge of nonparticipation in counterinsurgency programs. The pledge stated:
U.S. military and intelligence agencies and military contractors have identified “cultural knowledge,” “ethnographic intelligence,” and “human terrain mapping” as essential to US-led military intervention in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East … Such work breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world and, directly or indirectly, enables the occupation of one country by another. In addition, much of this work is covert. Anthropological support for such an enterprise is at odds with the humane ideals of our discipline as well as professional standards.22
The Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ pledge was premised in large part on opposition to the war in Iraq. But the American Anthropology Association, the main professional body for anthropologists, raised broader ethical concerns. In October 2007, the “triple A” issued a statement condemning the program, saying that the Human Terrain System violated the ethical directive that anthropologists first “do no harm” to the individuals they study. “As members of HTS teams, anthropologists provide information and counsel to U.S. military field commanders,” the statement read. “This poses a risk that information provided by HTS anthropologists could be used to make decisions about identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations either in the short or long term.”
Proponents of the Human Terrain System argued that the data they collected in the field was appropriately firewalled, and that it could not be tapped by military units for purposes of targeting. McFate stated in a 2008 interview:
The S-2 [the military intelligence staff] can’t come to the Human Terrain Team and say: “I need to find out x about this person.” They literally can’t do that. We don’t want, as a program, the Human Terrain Teams, doing anything that’s involved in lethal targeting. That’s not their job … The military does not need our help to do that. They’re the best in the world doing that. We’re trying to be a resource for who their friends are.23
Then there was the nettlesome question of consent. Human Terrain Teams traveled in the field with heavily armed military units. When a researcher—in uniform, perhaps armed, and probably accompanied by a rifle platoon—stopped to interview an Afghan villager, it might seem more than just a little coercive. How much useful ethnographic or cultural information could be extracted under such conditions? Would villagers simply tell researchers what they wanted to hear? How, in the long term, did researchers expect to build rapport with ordinary people when they were swaddled in body armor, and carrying weapons? Social scientists training at Fort Leavenworth even learned the practice of “windshield ethnology”—observing groups from inside a vehicle.24 But that sounded absurd. How much could you understand of a local community while gazing through the bulletproof windshield of an up-armored Humvee?
Despite these flaws, the program still seemed quite attractive to the military. Colonel Martin Schweitzer, commander of the Fourth Brigade, Eighty-second Airborne Division, told David Rohde of the New York Times that his unit had reduced their dependence on lethal operations by 60 percent since the Human Terrain Team was attached to his unit. “We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”25
Schweitzer’s statistics were questionable: When David Price, a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to look at the report supporting that claim, he received correspondence that merely restated the 60 percent figure, without an actual report to back up the statistic.26 Still, it was a compelling idea. A little respect, compassion, and cultural sensitivity might save human lives. Instead of conducting an aggressive house-to-house search for bomb-making materials, a Human Terrain Team might be sent to coax information from a local community by offering to dig a well, resolve a tribal dispute, or redress some other local grievance. In parallel, the social scientists could teach soldiers to avoid cultural blunders that might injure local pride and motivate someone to shelter an insurgent, stash weapons, or attack coalition forces. Of course, it would be hard to measure progress. The effectiveness would be measured in roadside bombs that didn’t go off. The concerned anthropologists might have worried about the purity of their profession, but the Human Terrain System, at least, seemed to offer a practical way of reducing harm to civilians.
That interest in the application of social science to resolving conflict seems to be what motivated Michael Bhatia, a scholar assigned to Human Terrain Team AF1 in Khowst Province, southeastern Afghanistan. A magna cum laude graduate of Brown University and a Marshall Scholar at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Bhatia joined the program in 2007 after working for several years as a researcher on Afghanistan. His doctoral dissertation, “The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978–2005,” was based on hundreds of interviews he conducted with current and former combatants throughout Afghanistan, as well as archival and media research. He had also worked as a UN observer in East Timor and an election monitor in Kosovo. Described by his thesis advisor at Brown as “an idealist and a realist,” Bhatia went into the program with eyes open. “I am already preparing for both the real and ethical minefields,” he wrote in an e-mail to friends shortly before deploying to Afghanistan.27
In early May 2008, Bhatia was riding in a convoy through a remote sector of Khowst Province, not far from the Pakistan border. That area had been the scene of a long-standing tribal feud, and Bhatia hoped that he could help initiate tribal negotiations that might spark reconciliation. The meeting would never take place. A roadside bomb struck the convoy’s lead vehicle, and Bhatia was killed instantly. With Bhatia’s death, the Human Terrain System lost the poster child for the program, an idealistic, articulate young researcher with serious experience in Afghanistan and a genuine interest in
making military operations less lethal. It was the first of a series of deadly disasters for the program.
The main problem for Human Terrain Team IZ3, in Iraq, was electricity, not tribal politics. When major combat ended in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. military quickly discovered that one of the top complaints of the local population was power outages. During the summer months, when temperatures reached sweltering highs and the demand for cooling strained the electricity grid, neighborhoods received only two or three hours of power a day from municipal power. Things were a bit better in the winter, but residents still got power only about eight hours a day on the city grid. Power shortfalls exacerbated an already volatile situation in the capital. Power relations were constantly shifting. The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had managed to broker a ceasefire with the Jaish al-Mahdi, but Sunni Arab leaders worried that the Shia-dominated coalition had long-term designs to exclude them from power.
The U.S.-led coalition was in the middle, and it was focused on trying to find the right people to work with at the local level. It had thrown money at these problems before, often with little result. But Colonel Hort, the commander of the Third Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division, had made restoring essential services one of the priorities in the brigade’s area of responsibility.
In the past, U.S. commanders used their emergency funds to put power generators on the ground in residential neighborhoods of Baghdad. It was a well-intentioned gesture, but those generators were only a short-term fix. They didn’t come with maintenance, the government of Iraq and the local municipalities didn’t provide fuel, and no one was charged with maintaining them over the longer term. Many generators were supplied with enough fuel for one month; once that was gone, the generators simply were left to rust away.
For Hort’s power generation scheme to succeed in Sadr City, the brigade would have to do much more than install new generators or provide fuel. They would have to encourage the District Advisory Councils to exercise oversight, work with the central government to provide subsidized fuel, and make sure that the local community was invested in the upkeep. “With local power, it’s about buy-in with the local government; it’s about the Ministry of Oil agreeing to the fuel costs; it’s about the neighborhood agreeing to take care of it,” Hort said. “So it’s a co-op. It’s not just a generator that’s being bought by U.S. taxpayers’ money. It takes more time. You know, I can buy a generator probably tomorrow and put it on the ground—it’ll last maybe two months, at that. Co-ops take about two to three months to really get moving. Where you get everybody’s signature, everybody agrees to it, and that’s the cultural thing you described. Everything’s slower here, nothing is”—he snapped his fingers—“overnight.”
That was where Human Terrain Team IZ3 came into the picture. They were supposed to identify the local leaders who could help make this arrangement work. It would require a laborious series of “meeting engagements” between the brigade’s officers and local leaders such as the chairmen and deputy chairs of DACs, government officials, and tribal leaders. But it was more complicated than just identifying local counterparts. It also meant negotiating a byzantine system of local government that was a legacy of the administrative system created by Saddam Hussein.
For example, the government of Baghdad still essentially replicated the preinvasion Ba’ath regime model, in which the provincial council ran Baghdad via the Ba’ath Party. In 2008, the budget for the province still rested with the provincial council. The DAC, the democratically elected district council, had no budget, and no direct control over the baladiya, the public-works department for a particular area. The baladiya’s managers reported through the amanat—the municipal government—to the provincial council; they did not report directly to the DAC.
Another complicating factor was the remnants of Iraq’s command economy. Like basic foodstuffs, generator fuel was subsidized by the state, and rations were issued by Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, but much of the fuel ended up being sold on the street. The generators donated by the brigade were supposed to receive a certain amount of subsidized fuel, but there was little incentive to keep a neighborhood generator running when the operator could turn around and resell the subsidized fuel on the open market for a much higher price. This was a striking irony of U.S. involvement in Iraq: In order to keep the country from sliding into chaos, it had to prop up elements of Saddam Hussein’s dysfunctional command economy and administrative structure.
To complicate matters further, the clock was ticking. Under a security framework that was negotiated between the United States and Iraq in late 2008, U.S. troops were to begin a gradual withdrawal from Iraq’s cities by mid-2009. Within six months, the U.S. military would be moving to the periphery, and local communities would have to rely more and more on the provincial government and the national government and less and less on assistance from the United States. The costly U.S. investments in projects such as micro-power generation would be squandered if there was no Iraqi plan to sustain them. Things were moving swiftly, and the U.S. military needed to show progress.
Over the summer, Hort’s Third Brigade had paid for nine new neighborhood generators for that part of Sadr City. So the news that Hassan Shama, now Sadr City DAC chairman, brought Pierce and his Human Terrain IZ3 team was not good: “We had a promise to deliver some generators, you may have delivered those generators and you may have left them, but I’m not aware of it—the council’s not aware of it,” Shama said.
Ali Ghatte, who headed the DAC’s electricity committee and had accompanied Shama to the meeting, had counted only five generators. Another twist: they had no registration documents. In Iraq, a generator, like an automobile, came with registration papers. Without the papers, the DAC couldn’t get subsidized fuel from the Ministry of Oil. Shama, a beefy, forty-something man in jeans and green and yellow polo shirt with closely cropped mustache and goatee, explained this complicated situation to Pierce and Ted Andrews, the Foreign Service officer who headed the e-PRT.
As the Americans listened through the interpreters, Shama shifted restlessly in his seat, and steadily began to raise his voice.
“Let me say this,” Pierce said, trying to convey a sense of urgency. “Maybe we don’t look like we are concerned. We’re concerned with what you just told us, believe me.”
Andrews, rising above the crosstalk, added, “We will have the Army confirm with you … and if there is some big mistake, we have a gentleman from the press here who can write all this down!”
Switching to English, Shama said, “I’m sorry, mister, this is the problem.” Leaning energetically forward on his elbows, he resumed in Arabic. “This is how this thing’s supposed to be done,” he said. “If you have a quantity of generators, you should go to me and say you have those nine or ten generators. You tell us where the areas are that are most in need for them. Even if the Army is trying to put those generators up, they know who’s the [council] member for the section they are working in. They should have grabbed him and told him [Ali Ghatte]. The Army may have placed the generator there, but nobody’s aware of it. And nobody’s watching the generators. So someone may have just come and taken it.”
That worried Pierce. He called down to the brigade staff to sort out whether or not the generators had in fact been delivered or if they had in fact disappeared. A major from the brigade staff arrived shortly thereafter, looking confused.
“Let me do this as a district attorney here,” Pierce told the major. “Here is the deal that we have discovered. First of all, Ali Ghatte is concerned about the actual location—and, frankly, security of the microgenerators. He’s concerned, because we’ve given him in Arabic their location, and he says some of those are not in those mahallas [blocks] … Frankly, we’re concerned that some of them have been taken. So that’s a very significant issue.”
Solving that first issue was fairly straightforward. The major would arrange to pick up Ghatte and Shama in an armored vehicle and show them where all the generators were.
The second point, getting subsidized fuel, was a bit more complicated. They needed to get registration paperwork from Doctor Moayad Hamed, a Baghdad doctor who had built a lucrative postwar business as a contractor to the U.S. military. Doctor Moayad had won the contract to oversee the repair of Route Irish, the crucial Baghdad airport road. He had contracts for trash pickup, for street repair, even for painting bright murals to spruce up the concrete barriers that surrounded many residential neighborhoods. He had the contract for generators as well. The problem was, he was not turning over the paperwork.
Pierce said, “Ali Ghatte told us that he tried to talk to Doctor Moayad, and that for some reason Doctor Moayad is extremely reluctant to turn over the registration paperwork. Is that right?”
“That’s true, we contacted them more than one time,” Ghatte said.
Pierce, to the major, said sotto voce, “What I’m afraid is that he is turning around and using this registration paperwork to secure fuel and then selling it on the black market.”
“Sure,” the major whispered. “I’m tracking that.”
Pierce then cleared his throat. “I do have a couple questions for the group. Will copies of the registrations suffice to get the fuel flowing?”
Shama and Ghatte agreed that, yes, a copy of the paperwork would suffice. After two hours of debate, a temporary solution had been reached—or so it seemed. Later that month, the generators still were not operating.