After the heavy fighting ended around Garmsir, Helmand Province, Marines of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit began doling out cash compensation to Afghans for buildings damaged in the fighting. Back at headquarters in Kandahar, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Rene Cote, a Marine civil affairs specialist, told me the Marines handed out over $784,000 in battle damage aid at the Civil Military Operations Center in Garmsir. They also took biometric data – fingerprints, photos and retina scans. “We logged everybody who came in, took their pictures, thumbprints, all that kind of stuff,” he said.
“Which goes to intelligence collection?” I asked.
Cote raised a finger. “That wasn’t the primary purpose!” he said emphatically. “Its primary purpose is to validate that people are who they say they are and that kind of thing. And if we get multiple hits on the same person for different names, it might be an issue.”
“Human terrain mapping” is all the rage inside the Pentagon these days, part of a larger push to increase the cultural sophistication of the military. The Army has even funded a high-profile – and controversial -- effort to create Human Terrain Teams, anthropologists and social scientists embedded within brigades. One of the many criticisms of the program is that, in the end, it isn't an attempt to understand the locals -- it's a way of collecting intelligence on 'em. Intelligence which can later be used for targeting.
The Marines in Helmand did not have an HTT at their disposal. They did, however, create map overlays that would plot social relations and tribal affiliations in their area, along with photos of key local leaders. When I asked Colonel Peter Petronzio, the commander of the 24 MEU, about his approach to human terrain mapping, he offered a few thoughts on how he would refine the concept. Rather than hiring Ph.D.'s, Petronzio said he would recommend recruiting a cadre of native-borne advisers: “a native adviser, not an academic or a sociologist, but someone who is from the region. And who can sit in shuras and whisper in the battalion commander’s ear.”
By Petronzio’s reasoning, a local – as opposed to someone with academic training -- can read the nuances of custom, gesture or dialect.
They can tell when someone says one thing and means another, and so on.
Language is another issue. “Some of the interpreters aren’t very good,” Petronzio said. “What I am proposing is to identify half a dozen senior interpreters and link them with company commanders.” What about Marines learning Pashto or Dari, the main languages of Afghanistan, rather than relying on contract linguists? “You’d have a hard time doing that. Every year one third of the United States Marine Corps turns over. How are you going to generate a Dari or a Pashto capability? We focus more on the culture than the language.”
ALSO:
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* Anthropologists' Launch 'Human Terrain' Probe
* 2nd 'Human Terrain' Social Scientist Slain in 7 Weeks
* Academics Target Pentagon's Social Science Project
* 'Human Terrain' Social Scientist Killed in Afghanistan
* Pentagon Academic Outreach: Big Talk, Little Cash
* Pentagon's Project Minerva Sparks New Anthro Concerns
* Human Terrain's 'Catch-22'
* Gates: Human Terrain Teams Going Through 'Growing Pains'
* In Iraq, Psyops Team Plays on Iran Fears, Soccer Love
* How Technology Almost Lost the War
* Pentagon's 'Know the Enemy' Task Force
* Intel Geek Squad Targets Culture, Language
* Exploring Baghdad's "Human Terrain"
* Academics Turn on "Human Terrain" Whistleblower
* Army Social Scientists Calm Afghanistan, Make Enemies at Home
* Anthro Wars Heat Up
* Navy: Let's Play "Sim Iraq"
* Pentagon Plots Sim Iraq for Propaganda Tests
* "Sim Iraq" Sent to Battle Zone
* *Weekly Standard *Blasts "Human Terrain"
* Pentagon Forecast: Cloudy, 80% Chance of Riots
* Anthropology Association Blasts Army's "Human Terrain"
* Mapping Human Terrain "Enables the Kill Chain"?
* Pentagon Science & Technology: The Human Problem
* When Anthropologists Go to War
* When Anthropologists Go to War (Against the Military)
* When Anthropology Gets Ugly
* Report: Military Should Double Social Science Cash
* Can Social Science Win the War on Terror?
