The Pentagon’s Most Audacious Experiment Since Vietnam
From Vanessa Gezari’s ‘The Tender Soldier’
The Human Terrain System sought to win over Iraqis and Afghanis with social science and cultural understanding. Vanessa Gezari’s groundbreaking book “The Tender Soldier,” excerpted below, follows three Americans who become enveloped in the program’s moral purgatory.
Sometimes the events of a single day tell the story of a war.
On November 4, 2008, voters in the United States elected Barack Obama president, laying the groundwork for an expanded counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. On the same day, in the tawny flatlands west of Kandahar, a group of American civilians and soldiers set out on a hopeful mission that would change their lives and those of the Afghans they met forever. Among them was a brave and gentle woman with a Wellesley degree, a soldier’s devotion to her country, and a fierce curiosity about the world. Theirs was an anthropological undertaking, matching the audacity of Obama, an anthropologist’s son.
This book tells the story of what happened that day, and of the conception and rapid early growth of the Human Terrain System, a central tool in what was supposed to be a more culturally conscious way of war. It traces the first four years of this experiment, from its beginnings as a cultural knowledge database to fight homemade bombs in Iraq through its multimillion-dollar expansion. It follows the program through the height of American involvement in Afghanistan in 2010, when one hundred thousand U.S. troops were stationed there along with more than twenty Human Terrain Teams.
November 4, 2008
Chehel Gazi belonged to the landscape, to the green vineyards and pale dunes rolling away behind it, to the grit and trash of the bazaar on its western edge and the highway that marked its northern boundary. Its compounds and courtyards lay behind high, smooth walls that seemed to grow from the yellow mud like ancient earthworks. Only their doors and gates, made of wood or brightly painted metal, marked them as homes. A sand path ran alongside the little stream where the soldiers stood, but it felt more like an alley, edged on one side by compound walls and on the other by the stand of mulberry trees rooted along the banks of the irrigation channel. The village was named for this channel, or more precisely, for its source. Chehel Gazi means “forty meters,” the depth at which someone digging a well there would hit an underground aquifer. The village owed its relative prosperity to this water, which fed its vineyards and nourished its people and animals. Its nearness to the road and the bazaar, the economic hub of the district, both enriched it and exposed it to traffic with the outside world, to new ideas, to sin and danger. The bazaar was a gathering place for people from across the south, a place where information was traded and where the usual protections of a closed, communal society did not apply. The Taliban were in the bazaar every day, the district governor had told the Americans.
‘Chalgazi Village has Taliban living within it,’ a local policeman had told Ayala and the soldiers a week earlier.
For years, soldiers had been arriving in Iraq and Afghanistan with little or no knowledge about the people who lived there. But the longer they stayed on the ground, the more problematic this became. Infantrymen in their teens and twenties had become de facto ambassadors, trying to barter political agreements between tribal leaders and drive a wedge between civilians and an enemy that was all but indistinguishable from them. Shock and awe had given way to the newly rediscovered military strategy known as counterinsurgency, which promised a smarter, more humane way of fighting. The strategy’s greatest champion, General David Petraeus, had recently taken charge of Central Command, where he oversaw American military efforts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus spoke of Afghanistan’s “human terrain” as the decisive battleground for U.S. forces, and by “human terrain,” he meant the Afghan people.
The Human Terrain System was designed to plant civilian social scientists, including anthropologists, in frontline military units to act as cultural translators to soldiers, marines, and their commanders.
It wasn’t just that Americans dealt rudely with Afghans because they didn’t know the first thing about their culture. It was that, too often, they detained and killed the wrong people, alienating others and fueling the insurgency. Success hinged on winning hearts and minds, but it also depended on good intelligence, for counterinsurgency was comprised of two distinct and seemingly contradictory kinds of activity. The first involved humanitarian aid and development, psychological operations, and political persuasion to soften local resistance, build relationships, and gather intelligence. The second used that intelligence to guide everything from food handouts to detentions and targeted killings. The
Human Terrain System was a soft tool, but it was part of a hard and complicated battle.
The Human Terrain Team and the soldiers split up. Loyd and Cooper lingered near the district headquarters, close to the highway and the bazaar, while Ayala and another group of soldiers kept walking farther along the path edging the stream, stopping at a small footbridge beyond the trees. Ayala sat on the bridge in the sun, bantering with the soldiers and handing out candy to children. There was something intoxicating about this place, so often patrolled that it had come to feel familiar, so close to the base that it almost had to be safe. Water lapped the edges of the channel. Near the bazaar, in an open space at the intersection of two sandy lanes, Loyd and Cooper handed out pens and candy to kids on their way to school.
Their regular translator wasn’t with them that day. Instead, they were working with an interpreter the Americans called Jack Bauer after the terrorist-hunting hero of the television show 24. The soldiers gave funny nicknames to all their interpreters to mask their identities—Rock Star, Tom Cruise, Chuck Norris, even Ron Jeremy after a well-known porn star. Jack Bauer was a twenty-three-year-old Pashtun with a dark pompadour, crooked teeth, and liquid puppy-dog eyes. He often translated for the young captain in charge of Comanche Company, but he had gotten to know Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper because the Human Terrain Team shared a tent with the Afghan interpreters on the small firebase near the district center. The tent was divided by a plywood partition, Americans on one side, Afghans on the other. Sometimes Loyd dropped by the interpreters’ side to say hello. Once, she and Ayala invited Jack and some other interpreters to watch The Da Vinci Code on someone’s laptop. Loyd had asked Jack about his family, what he did before, how long he had been working with the soldiers.
Jack liked this American woman. She was very friendly and kind, equally eager to talk to soldiers, interpreters like him, or Afghans she met on the street. But he didn’t entirely understand what she and her teammates were doing out there. They told everyone they were civilians, not soldiers, and Loyd seemed eager to hand out wheat seed to farmers so they wouldn’t plant opium poppy. Jack thought that Ayala and Cooper were her bodyguards. He had seen her talking to Afghan soldiers and police during meetings at the district governor’s office, and the few times he’d worked with her, he had noticed that she always carried candy, and that kids came running when they saw her. A few days earlier, he had seen some kids swarming around her and spoken up.
‘Hey, Paula, this isn’t the United States,’ he’d told her. ‘In this country, it’s very dangerous. Actually, this province is very dangerous. Don’t give candy to the kids.’
Loyd had stiffened. ‘Jack, you’re the interpreter,’ she had told him.
‘You just interpret what I say. You’re not my boss.’
‘Yes,’ he had told her. ‘Okay.’
He had thought she was angry with him, but back at the base she’d sought him out, made a point of saying hello, asked if he was mad at her. Of course not, he’d told her. Still, those children worried him. She didn’t carry a gun.
“The enemy will use different weapons in different ways,” he would say later. “We can’t identify which people is civilian, which people is the Taliban.”
Jack’s words signaled his mistrust of the situation he’d gotten himself into. He had been raised in Kabul, where young men listened to Bollywood soundtracks, wore tight jeans, and exchanged shy glances with girls. Kandahar was a different story—older, rougher, a universe of men without women—and Maiwand was the countryside.
The Afghans he met there were nothing like the people he knew back home. On the rare occasions when Maiwand revealed itself to him, it always managed to remind him how little he knew. The insurgents talked to each other on field radios, and Jack and the other interpreters were given the job of monitoring the conversation and reporting back to the Americans. During patrols, a soldier would hand the interpreters a scanner, and they would listen to insurgents watching them from somewhere nearby.
‘We saw the American forces leave their base,’ an insurgent would say to one of his comrades on the radio. ‘They went through the bazaar. We saw them walking near that small mountain.’
The interpreters couldn’t see the Taliban, but the Taliban could see them. It was eerie, and there was an element of psychological play to it; the insurgents knew the Americans were listening, knew they would be unnerved by the awareness that they were being watched.
Whenever the insurgents wanted to convey something really important they would switch to cell phones, which were harder to monitor.
Sometimes Jack heard insurgents talking on the radio about planting bombs near the road, and he and the other interpreters would lean in close and try to figure out where they could possibly be talking about so they could tell the Americans in time.
That morning at the edge of Chehel Gazi, villagers passed the patrol on their way to the bazaar. Jack Bauer stopped a man carrying an armful of bread so that Loyd could ask what he had paid for it. She scribbled something in her notebook. She asked a shopkeeper whether the Afghan police taxed merchants. In a manner of speaking, the man told her. The police sometimes asked for money, or simply took things without paying for them. Cooper stood listening nearby. He watched the soldiers stop a man with a donkey cart and search it thoroughly, carefully, before waving it on.
A young bearded man walked past them. He was thin and slight, dressed in a blue tunic, baggy pants, and a vest, and carrying a metal jug. He stuck his head into a nearby compound with a green metal door, then stepped inside. Some children were playing near the compound, including a boy of about twelve.
‘We don’t know that guy,’ Cooper heard one of the kids say in Pashto. ‘What’s he doing?’ The man with the jug came out and made a sweeping motion with his hand, as if to shoo the children away.
‘Hey, Jack, ask that guy if he wants to talk to me,’ Loyd said.
‘Hey, my boss wants to talk to you for a few minutes,’ Jack Bauer called out to the man with the jug. ‘Are you ready?’
The man agreed. He even knew a few words of English, enough to say “hello” and “thank you.” He appreciated the Americans being there, he told them. He shook Cooper’s hand.
‘You speak English well,’ Cooper told him. ‘Where did you learn it?’
‘In school.’
‘What’s in your jug?’ Loyd asked.
‘Fuel for my water pump,’ the man said, reverting to his own language.
He seemed friendly enough, but Cooper thought there was something cocky and tightly wound about him, not dangerous, but not exactly normal, either. The man with the jug reminded him of a particular kind of Afghan who often approached American patrols in Maiwand, striding forward with a sense of purpose, determined to engage the soldiers in a political discussion. These men blamed the Americans for Afghan deaths. Afghans wanted no part of this war, yet they were caught in the middle, driving over bombs and falling under stray gunfire.
If the Americans would just go home, the Afghans argued, people could go back to living quietly. When men like this berated the soldiers, Cooper listened patiently, then asked: ‘How come you don’t blame the Taliban when they commit violence, you only blame us?’
‘We can’t blame the Taliban,’ the men would tell him. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
The man with the jug wasn’t talking about politics, nor had he criticized the Americans. But Cooper sensed something polemical about him just the same.
‘How much does petrol cost in Maiwand?’ Loyd was asking him.
‘It’s very expensive,’ the Afghan told her. His motorcycle was damaged in the bazaar, and he was carrying the gas to refuel it. That was what Jack Bauer heard, and that was what he translated. What about needing fuel for his water pump? No one asked the man to resolve this discrepancy. Loyd asked about his job. He worked for a local school, he told her, and then a bit later, that he was a shopkeeper from Kandahar.
The school should be open for children, he told Loyd.
‘Would you like some candy?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t like candy,’ the man said. He turned to Jack Bauer. ‘Do you smoke?’
‘Yes, I smoke,’ Jack told him. The stress of working with the Americans only sharpened his cravings. He carried a pack of cheap Pakistani cigarettes in his uniform pocket that day.
‘Do you smoke?’ the man asked again. Again, Jack told him that he did.
About fifteen minutes passed in this scattershot conversation before the Afghan with the jug of fuel moved away. Cooper has been standing a few feet off, watching and listening, but now he turned to talk to an old man coming from the bazaar. The man had a white beard, and Cooper greeted him with elaborate politeness, asking about his family and where he came from.
He was vaguely aware that the man with the jug had returned and was talking to Loyd again. For a while, another Afghan came up and stood next to the first man. This second Afghan had a brown beard and friendly eyes. Cooper thought he must live in the compound with the green door a few feet from where they were standing, the one the man with the jug had ducked into before Jack had flagged him down.
After a few minutes, the friendly-eyed man turned and walked away. Cooper glanced over and saw that the man with the jug had set it on the ground and was gesticulating with his hands. He had now been talking to Loyd for nearly half an hour. The platoon medic, standing a few feet away, noticed that the Afghan was playing with a plastic lighter, turning it over in his hands.
About fifteen feet away, a handful of soldiers formed a loose wall shielding their platoon mates and the Human Terrain Team members from the bazaar. They stopped people and checked them for weapons before allowing them past, but now a knot of Afghan men formed around the soldiers, trying to tell them something. The Americans didn’t understand. The closest interpreter was Jack Bauer.
‘Hey, Jack!’ a soldier yelled.
Jack turned to answer, turned away from Loyd and the man with the jug. Suddenly, he felt a rush of air and a blast of heat and saw a bright plume of flame at the edge of his vision. Cooper was still talking to the old man, his back to Loyd, when he heard a gigantic whoosh.
He turned and saw, where she had stood, a column of flame shooting skyward, so large and furious that he had to step back to avoid being engulfed.
Learn more about The Tender Soldier or purchase a copy here.
Vanessa M. Gezari holds the James Madison Visiting Professorship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has written for The Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, and others. She lives in New York.
