Inside Afghanistan's 'Human Terrain' (Updated)

No journalist has spent more time in the field with the Army's controversial Human Terrain program -- embedding social science units into fighting forces -- than *Harpers' *Steve Featherstone. After a year-long wait, his story, a report from Afghanistan with the original Human Terrain Team, is finally out. And despite its age, the piece is still very much worth a read. Alas, it's only available online to magazine subscribers. __[UPDATE: Someone posted it, anyway. Here it is.] __But here's a snippet, so you'll go get it on the newsstand:

When the team first arrived at Salerno, no one understood what an HTT
was, much less what it did. They were hastily installed in the brigade’s intelligence section, where their talents were wasted in “the myopic role of an intel analyst,” Colonel Martin
Schweitzer, the brigade’s commanding officer, admitted later. Eventually they got their own office near the psyop
[psychological operations] desk. They had no immediate responsibilities, so they improvised and began building a rapport with the hundreds of local Afghan workers on base who did everything from interpreting to picking up trash. They jump-started reconstruction of the base mosque, which had fallen into disrepair. On one occasion, they consulted with psyop on a media campaign to discourage
Afghans from becoming suicide bombers. HTT helped pinpoint the most effective medium (radio), target demographic (fifteen- to thirty-yearold men), time slot (after dark, since most Afghan men work in the fields during the day), and even specific tastes
(“they love drama”). The team polled mullahs in order to craft the message for maximum impact and enlisted some of them to do the voice-overs, because non-Muslims cannot quote the Koran.
And they advised psyop to drop the part of the campaign that involved handing out copies of the Koran and prayer books. “You can’t even touch the Koran if you’re not Muslim!” Tracy said, shaking her head in amazement. “It could’ve been a marketing disaster.”

[Photo: Tomas Munita for The New York Times]

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