Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan PDF
Preview Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan
SOCIAL SCIENCE GOES TO WAR MONTGOMERY MCFATE JANICE H. LAURENCE (Editors) Social Science Goes to War The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan A A Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Copyright © Montgomery McFate and Janice H Laurence 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available McFate, Montgomery and Laurence, Janice H Social Science Goes to War The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan ISBN 978-0-19-021672-6 CONTENTS Foreword General (Ret) David H. Petraeus vii 1. I ntroduction: Unveiling the Human Terrain System Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence 1 2. Mind the Gap: Bridging the Military/Academic Divide Montgomery McFate 45 3. An Anthropologist at War in Afghanistan Ted Callahan 91 4. What Do You Bring to the Fight? A Year in Iraq as an Embedded Social Scientist Katherine Blue Carroll 119 5. Playing Spades in Al Anbar: A Female Social Scientist Among Marines and Special Forces Jennifer A. Clark 141 6. The Four Pillars of Integration: How to Make Social Science Work in a War Zone Kathleen Reedy 167 7. Investing in Uncertainty: Applying Social Science to Military Operations James Dorough-Lewis Jr. 187 8. Allied Civilian Enablers and the Helmand Surge Leslie Adrienne Payne 213 9. Assessing the Human Terrain Teams: No White Hats or Black Hats, Please Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and George R. Lucas Jr. 237 10. T angi Valley: The Limitations of Applied Anthropology in Afghanistan Brian G. Brereton 265 v CONTENTS 11. The Human Terrain System: Some Lessons Learned and the Way Forward Janice H. Laurence 291 Appendix: Interview Questions for HTS Personnel 317 Notes 319 Index 365 vi FOREWORD General (Ret) David H. Petraeus General (Ret) David H. Petraeus is Chairman of the KKR Global Institute. Prior to joining KKR, General Petraeus served over thirty- seven years in the U.S. military, including command of coalition forces in Iraq, command of US Central Command, and command of coalition forces in Afghanistan. Following his service in the military, General Petraeus served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. General Petraeus graduated with distinction from the US Military Academy and subsequently earned MPA and Ph.D. degrees in interna- tional relations from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. General Petraeus has received numerous US military, State Department, NATO, and United Nations medals and awards, and he has been decorated by thirteen foreign countries. He also serves as a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, as a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, and as Judge Widney Professor at the University of Southern California. General Petraeus is a member of the advisory board of Team Rubicon and a number of other veterans’ organizations. *** Counterinsurgency operations are sometimes described as “armed social work.” This description is meant to convey that counterinsur- gency campaigns require more than just the tasks associated with offensive and defensive operations—that counterinsurgency campaigns have to include a host of so-called “stability operations” tasks as well. vii FOREWORD The term “armed social work” thus highlights that, in addition to lethal force to combat the enemy, a counterinsurgency campaign has to include a variety of activities beyond those of vital conventional mil- itary operations that seek to clear areas of insurgents and then to hold them. The additional tasks range from assisting with the development of military and police forces and the re-establishment of critical gov- ernmental institutions, to helping restore basic services, rebuild dam- aged infrastructure, and restore (or build) various components of the rule of law. Additionally, and very importantly, all of these endeavors have to be undertaken in a manner that reflects a granular understand- ing of the local cultures, religions, customs, laws, and social organiz- ing principles and structures if the overall effort is to succeed in the long run. Indeed, outside approaches should not be imposed on a for- eign society; rather, sustainable change has to emerge from the efforts of the nation itself in line with the unique conditions of the local area. As T.E. Lawrence famously cautioned in his Twenty Seven Articles in 1917, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better [they] do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.” Carrying out “armed social work” in a foreign country thus neces- sitates considerable knowledge of that country and its culture, tradi- tions, laws, and practices. Indeed, such knowledge can be decisive in a counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, this critical lesson has been forgot- ten from time-to-time, and it has cost intervention forces dearly in cer- tain cases. As I noted while still in uniform, for example, American military elements were not nearly as well prepared as we should have been at the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the situ- ations that we faced. In fact, at the outset of both those campaigns we lacked the detailed, granular understanding of the countries we were invading. Our forces were, moreover, primarily organized, trained and equipped for major combat operations rather than for a mix of those operations plus the myriad additional tasks essential to the conduct of a counterinsurgency campaign. Beyond that, as I also noted while in uniform, it took us years just to get the inputs right in both Afghanistan and Iraq—that is, to get the “big ideas” (the strategy) right, to commu- nicate the big ideas effectively throughout our forces, to establish the organizational elements and architecture needed to properly implement the big ideas together with our coalition and host nation partners, and to deploy the military and civilian resources required to conduct the resulting comprehensive civil-military campaign.1 viii
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