'Human Terrain' Social Scientist Killed in Afghanistan

**Any death notice is sad. But it's particularly saddening to read that Michael V. Bhatia, a social scientist who was working in Afghanistan on the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System, was killed by a roadside bomb. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a few details about Bhatia:

The program has prompted widespread criticism, but Mr. Bhatia strongly supported it, according to a memorial notice that was posted on Thursday by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

The institute quoted a November 2007 letter in which Mr. Bhatia wrote, “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population’s concerns, views, criticisms, and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”

The Watson Institute’s notice does not describe the circumstances of Mr. Bhatia’s death, but an e-mail message circulated on Thursday said that he had been killed by a roadside bomb near Khost, an eastern city near the Pakistan border, perhaps in an incident reported by the Voice of America. Two NATO soldiers died in that same attack.

The Watson Institute's write-up of Bhatia is now offline, but the Complex Terrain Laboratory has an excerpt of what was there. Bhatia's death likely will bring wider attention to the larger debate about social scientists and the Pentagon, but there's actually some important facts to note.

Some of the most vocal criticism of the human terrain system has been from anthropologists, who have questioned whether working on the human terrain system violates anthropologists' professional ethics. Bhatia, however, was a political scientist.

Another major criticism of the human terrain system, in some recent press articles, has been about the lack of qualified social scientists. Bhatia, however, had a great deal of relevant experience:

• His dissertation is titled "The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978-2005," which is based on 350 interviews with combatants throughout Afghanistan, as well as archival and media research. *

**

*Mr. Bhatia has conducted research in Afghanistan for the Overseas Development Institute, the Small Arms Survey, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, the UK Department for International Development (via the International Policy Institute, King’s College, London) — and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. *

**

*He has also done humanitarian work and research in the Sahrawi refugee camps, East Timor and Kosovo. Before coming to the Institute, Mr. Bhatia was a sessional lecturer on the causes of war in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa. *

This was a man who brought sensitivity and nuance to his studies, as this beautiful two-part essay for The Globalist shows:

*The renewed insurgency has only fortified a belief in the West that war is an intrinsic part of Afghan culture. The image of the Afghan is commonly that of a refugee child, a woman in the burqa or a Mujahideen with the Kalashnikov.
*

*A
century earlier, British lithographs commonly depicted the turbaned
Afghan on a mountain perch in flowing robes, with his jezail aimed at a
British convoy marching below, and with a long knife tucked into his waistband. While the technology had changed, the core themes are strikingly similar. *

• And so, our first ideas of Afghanistan are of warfare, desolate rural villages, destroyed urban centers — and of squalid refugee camps.
  And of suffering, oppression, conflict and fanaticism...*

*My interviews with 345 ex-combatants revealed a diverse series of histories. I talked with individuals negotiating both local and national insecurity and personal needs with broader communal family and tribal obligations. *

• Meta-accounts of jihad-inspired fanatics or of poppy-funded warlords collapse in these interviews, revealing diverse local histories of participation in conflict. Combatants were also traders, farmers, shepherds, business-owners, and migrant-laborers — and they had conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate fighting...*

[M]any foreign “helpers” live sheltered from daily life in Afghanistan —
rarely traveling outside of Kabul and only interacting with Afghans as colleagues, servants or beneficiaries. Closeness is prevented by guardposts, compound walls, restaurants and the closed doors of white landcruisers...

• These tactics were adopted by the insurgents in anticipation of this counter-reaction — pushing internationals further into closed compounds, slowing reconstruction, and removing the potential for local interaction. *

*Without opportunities to interact, the outside becomes threatening... The process of strapping on a flak jacket, of sitting within a lightly armored vehicle, of peering outside from its small viewing windows, transformed a daily trip into something more menacing... *

*During my five research trips to Afghanistan since August 2001 —
ranging from one to four months — I have tried to walk as much as possible, both between meetings and on the weekends, also traveling to provinces and regions in order to research conflict dynamics. *

*This formal and informal wandering opened up a different view of
Afghanistan outside of security concerns and meta-descriptions. It revealed an Afghanistan of trade and poverty, of both reconstruction and continued deprivation, of contentious politics and of community reconciliation — and of daily life next to and within conflict.
*

The Human Terrain System is a program we've discussed at some length here on DANGER ROOM. Most of the discussion about the nascent program has been theoretical. Regardless of that wider debate, Michael Bhatia's death drives home the personal risks and sacrifice of social scientists working in war zones.

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