The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (25 page)

A fresh Human Terrain Team showed up at Leatherneck a few days later. AF7 was bound for Camp Dwyer, another base in Helmand. One morning, I found the new arrivals seated in a semicircle around Dunlap, who was briefing them about the area. The team’s two social scientists, a fresh-faced young woman and a slight man in a black mock turtleneck, leaned in. A female Army major sat next to a young man in a
T-shirt. The team leader, a silver-haired retired Marine officer, stood listening. Dunlap was telling them about the pro-NATO night letters she’d written for the British psychological operations guys.

“What are night letters?” one of the new team members asked.

Patiently, Dunlap explained.

The social scientist in the turtleneck spoke up. “Why don’t they just put it in the mailbox,” he asked, “rather than hang it up somewhere and see if they see it?”

Dunlap paused, unsure how to respond. “It’s traditional,” she finally said. “It’s like a proclamation. This is the way they pass messages to the community.”

AF7 had arrived at the beginning of a long-awaited troop surge in one of the most important parts of the country for the U.S. military, and they didn’t know that mailboxes were all but obsolete in Afghanistan.
Cardinalli had handed out Icy Hot to a woman with a medical condition that stemmed from having given birth to ten children in a country with dismal health care and a soaring maternal mortality rate. Was this really the best we could do?

*  *  *

Counterinsurgency was the
fad of the moment, and it was all about protecting the Afghan people. But the Marines had landed in Helmand eager for a fight. In the summer and fall of 2009, the brass at Leatherneck obsessively planned the invasion of Marja, which some were calling the next Falluja. Meanwhile, a group of marines in the verdant, sandy Helmand River valley were learning plenty about local culture.
Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill McCollough, had served in Iraq’s Anbar Province, where Sunnis had risen up against Al Qaeda. Before coming to Afghanistan, he and his men had spent three months
boning up on Islam, Afghan culture, and Pashtunwali, the traditional code of the Afghan south. Eighty of McCollough’s marines had studied Pashto, the main language spoken in Helmand, and they could be found practicing with Afghan petitioners who approached the gates of their small firebases. After landing in the farming district of Nawa in June 2009, they had beaten back the Taliban and transformed a deserted bazaar into a busy shopping center. They patrolled on foot day and night, sometimes sleeping in cornfields; helped resolve local disputes; and threw money at bridge repairs and irrigation projects that the Afghans badly needed. Along the way, they got to know the place well. The company I visited lived on a small stretch of rocky dirt near the bazaar, where they slept on cots in the dust or in tents open to the night air. They bought chicken, rice, and onions from local shopkeepers and cooked over campfires.

Marines are perhaps best known for killing, but McCollough’s battalion exemplified the service’s long-standing interest in cultural intelligence. An expeditionary force, amphibious and adaptable, Marines have a history of engagement in small wars.
They landed 180 times in thirty-seven countries between 1800 and 1934, supporting “native troops” and taking on routine police and judicial functions until they could be turned over to the “native agencies to which they properly belong.”
A Marine Corps intelligence officer had to know the enemy leaders in his area and track their movements, but he was also expected to understand the vagaries of local politics, the workings of the economy, social mores, and “the attitude and activities of the civil population and political leaders insofar as those elements may affect the accomplishment of the mission.”
That is a much broader definition of intelligence than the one traditionally favored by the Army, where some believe that “intelligence” refers solely to information used to target the enemy.

A few months before my visit to Helmand, Marine Corps Major
Ben Connable had written that the Human Terrain System was a flimsy and transitory undertaking that devoured scarce resources yet was ill-equipped to meet the military’s crying long-term need for better cultural intelligence. In Quantico, Virginia, the Marine Corps’s Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning was housed in trailers next to the railroad tracks. For Connable, the trailers symbolized the military’s fleeting interest in initiatives that should have been ensconced in brick and cement. The military was engaged in a heady romance with all things culture-related, but what would happen when the moment passed and the money dried up? The Human Terrain System was a contractor-heavy, boutique operation that relied on field teams’ ostensible separation from the intelligence cycle to recruit civilian social scientists; conceptually and practically, it was unsustainable. An Arabic speaker, Connable had served in Iraq and seen firsthand the consequences of Americans’ paltry understanding of the people they were trying to win over. But he believed servicemen and -women were smart and capable enough to learn this stuff on their own. They didn’t need to outsource it to civilians. The military ought to take the problem seriously enough to invest in a durable, long-term solution, he argued. The Human Terrain System was just an expensive distraction.

Connable had a point, but the main problem with the Human Terrain System was much more basic: about half the Human Terrain Team members I met over eighteen months in Afghanistan should never have been there. AF6 managed some modest accomplishments, but none of the Human Terrain Team members at Camp Leatherneck had the kind of expertise that field commanders told me they were looking for. Indeed, none of the members of that team had ever been to Afghanistan before their Human Terrain deployment. Because the marines in charge at Leatherneck didn’t know what the Human Terrain Team was meant to accomplish, the team members did whatever they could, and
whatever came up. Dunlap, the Human Terrain analyst, wrote night letters for the British psyops team because that was where she felt most able to contribute and where her contributions were most appreciated.
Cardinalli’s report on homosexuality among Pashtun men was used by a Marine intelligence sergeant to shame a young man he was questioning. Major Steve Lacy, the leader of AF6, found that the only way he could gain traction within the Marine command culture in Helmand was by meeting the operational needs of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which in the fall of 2009 was primarily concerned with the impending invasion of Marja, the small farming community that had become a getaway zone for insurgents fleeing other parts of the province.

That fall, a Marine officer asked Lacy to begin collecting cultural information and “open source intelligence” in preparation for the invasion of Marja.
In a September 30 field report, Lacy detailed his interview with an Afghan police sergeant and landowner from the northern area of Marja, who identified the location of his home there and of a onetime police checkpoint, both of which had been taken over by insurgents. The Afghan marked the areas inhabited by several Pashtun subtribes, but he also supplied the name of the Taliban commander who had moved into his house and allegedly turned it into a bomb factory. The report included grid coordinates for important places in Marja, including the home of a local leader who had been killed by the Taliban; the home of an elder that had been occupied by the Taliban; a gas station used by insurgents “for refueling and as a gathering place”; and a Taliban checkpoint on the road to Lashkar Gah, “where the Taliban are reported to collect taxes from local residents.” The source supplied the radio call sign for a Taliban commander who controlled most of eastern Marja and pointed out a minefield and a bridge rigged with explosives that the insurgents planned to use against ISAF forces. He also described the location of an insurgent campsite, a cemetery, a cell
phone tower, several mosques, a school, and a number of key traffic intersections.
This was not the sort of cultural information the Human Terrain System had told commanders and the public it would be gathering; it sounded more like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam than a gentle effort to learn about local people. But this was exactly the kind of information the Marines wanted.
“They have a hard time, any of these guys, distinguishing sociocultural information from intel,” Lacy told me. “To them, it’s all the same stuff, and in a way, it is. Quite frankly, intelligence, by doctrine, is not supposed to be just classified stuff.”

By late 2009, the American Anthropological Association had conducted its own study of the Human Terrain System and concluded, correctly, that the teams were not doing anthropology. The distinction was important, but it didn’t entirely solve the anthropologists’ problem. Anthropology remained poorly understood by the military, the intelligence community, and the public. Too many people still thought of the Human Terrain System as “that military-anthropology program,” and too many press accounts still described it that way. The program had encouraged this confusion, even fed on it. In doing so, one anthropologist told me, the Human Terrain System had “set the relationship between anthropology and the government back forty years.”

What most people didn’t know was that
a number of anthropologists in good standing with the American Anthropological Association worked for the U.S. military and other defense and security organizations in jobs that they and their colleagues deemed ethically defensible.
It wasn’t working for the military or the government that caused trouble, these anthropologists contended; it was
what
you did.
Rob Albro, an anthropologist at American University and one of the Human Terrain System’s chief critics, acknowledged a reality that some anthropologists ignored. “The military has been given a lot of shit work for which it is not prepared,” he told me. “They’ve been given it because they are a large logistic organization. None other
exists on the planet, so they get it. It’s stability operations, it’s nation building, it’s development, it’s humanitarian relief. Should they be doing these things? My feeling is, no. Are they doing these things? Of course. We have to take seriously the idea that we can, in small but significant ways, help them to do that better.” Teaching culture to soldiers and marines before they deployed was one thing—and possibly a necessary thing. Conducting in-house studies of corporate culture at a big national nuclear lab was another. And deploying to an active war zone with soldiers, in uniform and often armed, to interview local people and gather intelligence, was something else again.

The Human Terrain System lied to the public and to its own employees and contract staff about the nature of its work in Afghanistan. The program did many things there, but intelligence gathering was certainly one of them. Not just, on occasion, the old-school, find-the-enemy kind of intelligence, but—in what were perhaps the program’s finest moments—the cultural, demographic, and political context that could transform inscrutable Afghanistan into a place with an intact social structure and clear mechanisms for conveying power, much like anywhere else. There were bright spots, but in the end, the Human Terrain System would prove less controversial for what it did than for its sheer incompetence.
Within a few months of my visit to Helmand, a Human Terrain Team member was fired after refusing to turn off her reading light during a night mission, attempting to reprimand a marine for what she viewed as inappropriate treatment of a troublesome Afghan, and spending three hours getting her hair braided in an Afghan compound while marines stood guard outside.
One of her teammates, a Vietnam veteran, was sent home after he pulled a knife on a British soldier in a tent the men were sharing.
By February 2010, the Marine colonel who supervised the Human Terrain Team at Leatherneck wrote in an email to a program official that the program’s effort in Helmand “is a mess and I think the guys in Kabul are full of crap. If
I were king for the day, then I would start firing people at the top. . . . I am still an advocate for HTT but my patience is wearing thin. If HTT fails in Helmand, then I am not sure the program should continue to exist at all.”

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War is a
form of hysteria to which no industry is more susceptible than defense contracting. Suddenly there is money for everything, but political will is fickle, Congress mercurial, and manufacturers and program developers must move fast before the funding dries up. The moment calls for speed, and speed calls for cutting corners.

The Human Terrain System had grown too fast. In early 2007, Steve Fondacaro had accompanied the first team to Afghanistan.
Soon after, the military wanted twenty-six teams instead of the original five. “We thought we had five teams and two years to build them, and it turned out we had to build twenty-six teams immediately,” McFate told me. “It was kind of catastrophic.” Recruitment was shoddy, and there were no systems in place to handle training and deploying so many teams. She and Fondacaro argued over how to proceed. ‘Look, this is expanding too fast,’ McFate says she told him. ‘We need to slow it down.’ They had been asked to provide Human Terrain Teams “that are going to be functional,” she told me, yet too many basic questions about how the teams should be trained and how they would operate in the field remained unanswered. But the massive, heavy gears of the Pentagon had already begun to turn. Soldiers were dying, and the Army wanted what it wanted, and wanted it now.

In 2006, before the first Human Terrain Team shipped out for Afghanistan, the men of the Foreign Military Studies Office had described the proposed teams in detail. Years later, two things about that debut article in
Military Review
stand out.
The first is its frankness about
the close connection between the Human Terrain System and military intelligence, a connection that program officials repeatedly denied. The second is its precision about the area-specific qualifications that Human Terrain Team members would purportedly possess.
As the people who ultimately ran the Human Terrain System would find out, only a handful of people with detailed sociocultural knowledge of Iraq and Afghanistan existed in the United States. Many had already taken other, better-paying jobs in the defense industry, and a significant number of social scientists, particularly anthropologists, refused to work in an active war zone for the U.S. military. Jacob Kipp, the former director of the Foreign Military Studies Office, had been one of the article’s authors. At the time, he told me, he had been thinking primarily about the Army’s needs in Iraq. He knew several qualified reservists who spoke Arabic; he knew hardly any who spoke Pashto. And therein lay a revelation.
The article was not shy about the need for intelligence skills on Human Terrain Teams because, at the time, its authors intended to staff the Human Terrain Teams not with civilian social scientists but with military reservists, for whom involvement in the intelligence cycle would be no big deal. But using reservists ultimately proved impossible. Once the Human Terrain idea gained currency, the ranks of qualified reservists couldn’t keep pace with the Army’s demand for teams. “Once we began to sell it, it got very popular,” Kipp told me, “and we had to look at another way of finding people to do it.”