The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (35 page)

The first was the World Basic Information Library:
Unless otherwise noted, information about the World Basic Information Library in this section is from Prinslow, interview by author, July 12, 2010, and Prinslow, “The World Basic Information Library Program,”
Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin,
October–December 2005, 51–53.

A few years later, when the Foreign Military Studies Office’s Soviet expert:
Kipp, interview by author, July 2, 2010. The reservist who joined AF1 was Captain Roya Sharifsoltani. See Mike Belt, “Military Veteran: Knowing War Zone’s Culture
Important,”
LJWorld.com
,
November 16, 2007,
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/nov/16/military_veteran_knowing_war_zones_culture_importa
/, accessed July 16, 2012.

Since 2005, the Foreign Military Studies Office:
Jerome E. Dobson, “AGS Conducts Fieldwork in Mexico,”
Ubique: Notes from the American Geographical Society
26, no. 1 (February 2006), and “México Indígena: Final Report (Short Version for the Web),”
http://uaslp.academia.edu/MiguelRobledo/Papers/1073836/THE_AGS_BOWMAN_EXPEDITIONS_PROTOTYPE_DIGITAL_GEOGRAPHY_OF_INDIGENOUS_MEXICO
, accessed September 15, 2012.

the project was the brainchild of Jerome E. Dobson:
CV of Jerome E. Dobson,
http://www2.ku.edu/~geography/peoplepages/Dobson_D.shtml
, accessed July 6, 2012.

Dobson viewed geography as a key source of intelligence:
Jerome E. Dobson, “Foreign Intelligence Is Geography,”
Ubique: Notes from the American Geographical Society
25, no. 1 (March 2005).

In 2006, Dobson and other members:
Jerome E. Dobson, “Fort Leavenworth Hosts AGS Council,”
Ubique: Notes from the American Geographic Society
27, no. 3 (December 2006).

With the Bowman Expeditions, Dobson:
The United States and its allies won the war, but for most Americans, geography was reduced to the study of maps and capitals. Geography lost public support and almost disappeared from academia after World War II, Dobson wrote, in part because a German geographer had served as Hitler’s chief geopolitical strategist. In 2006, Dobson wrote of his concern that geography was losing out to cultural anthropology in the contest to influence national policy. He made no secret of his view that geography could and should be used to improve intelligence. The Bowman Expeditions, he wrote, “came about because I, like so many others, am troubled over intelligence failures and bipartisan blunders that lead to conflict. Most of the missing knowledge is not secret, insider information that should be classified. What’s missing is open source geography of the type we teach routinely in regional geography courses, and it’s based on the type of fieldwork and data analyses that geographers do routinely in every region on earth. I firmly believe the only remedy is to bring geography back to its rightful place in higher education, science policy, and public policy circles.” Later, the American Geographical Society and the Bowman Expedition geographers would seek to distance themselves from the Human Terrain System. In 2009, after a nongovernmental organization representative and a group of geographers criticized members of the first expedition, México Indígena, for allegedly failing to tell Mexicans whose land they surveyed that the research was funded by the Department of Defense, the Geographical Society wrote: “The program has never requested nor has it received any funding from the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) program, whose design differs in crucial ways from our posted guidelines.” See Dobson, “Foreign Intelligence Is Geography,” 2; “AGS Conducts Fieldwork in Mexico,” 2; and “The American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expeditions Seek to Improve Geographic Understanding at Home and Abroad: Spotlight on
México Indígena,
”
http://www.amergeog.org/newsrelease/bowmanPR-en.pdf
, accessed July 6, 2012.

Don Smith had met with then-Colonel John W. “Mick” Nicholson:
Smith told me the meeting actually took place in the fall of 2005. Smith, interview by author, February 19, 2013. See also Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming, 2013, 36.

That summer, Smith and others at the Foreign Military Studies Office:
Prinslow, interview by author, July 12, 2010, and Smith, interview by author, February 19, 2013. Prinslow looked to his World Basic Information Library network for qualified reservists, but the library was never envisioned as an operational group whose members would be sent to a conflict zone. Until then, they had essentially been doing Internet research.

That fall, the men of the Foreign Military Studies Office:
Kipp et al., “The Human System: A CORDS for the 21st Century,” 8–15.

In the years when the Human Terrain System was being developed:
Rick Atkinson, “Iraq Will Be Petraeus’s Knot to Untie,”
Washington Post,
January 7, 2007.

Petraeus saw the move:
Cloud and Jaffe,
The Fourth Star,
216–17.

Between 2005, when he arrived at Leavenworth:
John A. Nagl, “Foreword to the University of Chicago Press Edition,”
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xiv.

It argued that in this new, old kind of war:
The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,
39–40.

“Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is”:
Ibid., 48–50.

The manual brought together military intellectuals:
Sarah Sewall, “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual,” ibid., xxi, xxv–xxvi.

The manual was a barn burner:
Nagl, “Foreword,” ibid., xvii. Copies of the manual were found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan, Nagl notes.

It laid out a plan for winning over Iraqis and Afghans:
In an unprecedented effort to invest American civil society in the strategy, the military invited “journalists, human rights advocates, academics” and others to vet a draft of the manual, Nagl wrote. “James Fallows, of the
Atlantic Monthly,
commented at the end of the conference that he had never seen such an open transfer of ideas in any institution, and stated that the nation would be better for more such exchanges.” Conrad Crane, the manual’s master conductor, was featured in
Newsweek
as a “Man to Watch” in 2007. Ibid., xvi–xvii. See also Cloud and Jaffe,
The Fourth Star,
218–20.

This would turn out to be a winning strategy:
When General Stanley McChrystal was asked to assess the Afghan war in 2009, he recruited a team of Washington intellectuals, strategists, and policy makers to help sell his argument back home.

What the manual downplayed:
See
U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual,
174–77. Although the manual does not draw attention to the role of lethal force, General Stanley McChrystal’s terrorist-targeting teams were arguably as important to stabilizing Iraq as the development projects and political negotiations undertaken by surge troops. Between the summer of 2010 and the spring
of 2011, at the height of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, Petraeus doubled the number of kill/capture missions in that country. Classical counterinsurgency had been all but abandoned in Afghanistan for lack of political will by mid-2011, but there is no question that the strategy is inherently schizoid in nature. In Afghanistan in 2010, Michael Hastings reported hearing General McChrystal tell a Navy SEAL: “ ‘You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight. . . . I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.’ ” Intelligence gathered in counterinsurgency can help soldiers decide where it is best to build a school, but it also tells them who to kill. If the intelligence is good, it may lead to killing fewer people, supporting the notion that counterinsurgency is a more precise and humane way of war. But if it is flawed, the detentions and killings remain as inhumane as they would be in any conventional fight. See “Iraq After the Surge I: The New Sunni Landscape,” International Crisis Group, Middle East Report N°74, April 30, 2008, 2; “Kill/Capture,” PBS
Frontline,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kill-capture
/, accessed July 6, 2012, and transcript,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/transcript
/, accessed July 6, 2012; and Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,”
Rolling Stone,
July 8–22, 2010.

Montgomery McFate’s articles:
McFate, interview by author, June 30, 2010.

“If you don’t get it about this stuff”:
General Petraeus, interview by author, October 31, 2010.

McFate’s contribution to the manual turned out to be substantial:
The intelligence chapter’s lead author was Kyle Teamey, a former Army intelligence captain who had graduated from Dartmouth, served with John Nagl in Iraq, and later helped develop the DARPA intelligence system TIGR. Teamey pulled the chapter together while studying for a master’s at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. About thirty-five people contributed to the chapter in some way, he told me, and pointed out McFate’s submission on
pages 84
–100. Teamey, interview by author, August 25, 2010. See also Kyle Teamey and Jonathan Sweet, “Organizing Intelligence for Counterinsurgency,”
Military Review,
September–October 2006, 24–29; Mari Maeda, “TIGR: An Introduction,” DARPA, March 2010; and “Liquid Light: About Us,”
http://liquidlightinc.com/about.html#teamey
, accessed July 6, 2012.

an active local insurgency led by Jalaluddin Haqqani:
For more on the Haqqanis and their history with the Americans, see Steve Coll,
Ghost Wars
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 157; Mark Mazzetti, Scott Shane, and Alissa J. Rubin, “Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan,”
New York Times,
September 24, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/world/asia/brutal-haqqani-clan-bedevils-united-states-in-afghanistan.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
; and Dan Froomkin, “Jalaluddin Haqqani, Once CIA’s ‘Blue-Eyed Boy,’ Now Top Scourge for U.S. in Afghanistan,”
Huffington Post,
October 7, 2011,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/07/haqqani-network-afghanistan_n_987762.html
. For Sirajuddin, see
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/terrorinfo/sirajuddin-haqqani
/view, accessed August 12, 2012.

Smith left the Human Terrain System:
Smith and Fondacaro disagreed about how to take the project forward. For the initial $20 million from the Joint IED Defeat Organization, McFate and Fondacaro, “Reflections on the Human Terrain System During the First Four Years,” 66, and Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming, 2013, 37.

Fondacaro’s old friend Votel:
Lamb et al., “Human Terrain Team Performance: An Explanation, draft,” forthcoming, 2013, 41.

It was there, in the fertile bowl-shaped plateau and the mountains:
Coll,
Ghost Wars
(New York: Penguin, 2004), 156–57, and Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban: Islam, Oil, and the New Great Game in Central Asia
(New York: Tauris, 2000), 132.

In 1986, bin Laden had established:
Rashid,
Taliban,
132, and Coll,
Ghost Wars,
157.

Years later, he would issue a fatwa from Khost:
Rashid,
Taliban,
134.

At least twenty-one presumed jihadist volunteers died:
Coll,
Ghost Wars,
409–11, and Rashid,
Taliban,
134. For the revival of the Khost training camps, Mark Fineman, Bob Drogin, and Josh Meyer, “Camps Are Rubble but Their Threat Remains,”
Los Angeles Times,
December 18, 2001.

Some of the September 11 hijackers trained in Khost:
For a detailed description of Khost as a place whose history “reads like a timeline of the ‘global war on terror,’ ” see Steve Featherstone, “Human Quicksand: For U.S. Army, a Crash Course in Cultural Studies,”
Harper’s,
September 2008, 61. For Khost as a training ground for U.S. hijackers, see
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/afghanistan-pakistan/kill-capture/transcript
/.

The members of AF1, as the team was known:
Tracy, interviews by author, December 15, 2009, and December 15, 2012.

In one community, Tracy pointed out:
The community with more widows than usual was in Ghazni Province. Tracy, interview by author, December 15, 2012. See also Rohde, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones,” and Scott Peterson, “U.S. Army’s Strategy in Afghanistan: Better Anthropology,”
Christian Science Monitor,
September 7, 2007.

It was a good idea, but one that:
See Mazzetti, Shane, and Rubin, “Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan.”

The Human Terrain Team connected soldiers with local leaders:
Gezari, “The Base, the Mosque and the Olive Trees,” Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, February 18, 2010,
http://pulitzercenter.org/blog/untold-stories/afghanistan-base-mosque-and-olive-trees
, accessed July 6, 2012.

‘It may be one less trigger that has to be pulled here’:
Peterson, “U.S. Army’s Strategy in Afghanistan.”

She was ‘taking the population and dissecting it’:
Ibid.

Colonel Schweitzer would become:
A later iteration of the brigade’s Human Terrain Team included Michael Bhatia, a young scholar who had done extensive and
impressive research on warring factions and security policy in Afghanistan and was one of the most qualified people ever to deploy with a Human Terrain Team. Bhatia was killed in Khost in 2008. Schweitzer called him “the smartest human being I’ve ever spoken to in my life.” Schweitzer, interview by author, July 14, 2009.