The Pentagon's Brain (40 page)

“I think the idea that there can be a kinder, gentler counterinsurgency war is a myth,” said González. “I think it’s a hope that many people have. It’s a kind of dream that they [anthropologists] can somehow do things differently. I do think it’s a myth, though, and I think we have lots of historical evidence to back that up.”

With the debate escalating, the Pentagon cultivated two succinct narratives regarding the Human Terrain System, as exemplified in educational courses taught at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the U.S.
Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. One narrative was that Human Terrain Teams helped make way for “the moral prosecution of warfare.” That time and again, the teams enabled soldiers to narrowly avert disaster. That putting anthropologists on the battlefield made soldiers better able to engage in so-called “honorable warfare.” The experiences of Major Philip Carlson and his unit in the wrongful arrest of an Iraqi village elder, as taught by the Army, illustrate this point of view.

“My very first time out in an HTT [Human Terrain Team] in Iraq, we had a company airmobile to the countryside because of the IED threat on the road,” said Carlson. The Human Terrain Team was attached to a patrol fire squadron in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment and was carrying out “random interviews and know and search operations.” Carlson was having problems with his local interpreters, whom he described as “young, gung-ho Shi’ites who were motivated to capture terrorists.” In one particular house, Major Carlson recalled, coalition forces discovered an older man in possession of a rifle scope and a closetful of books. The interpreters insisted that the books were “jihadist in nature and the [rifle] scope was for a sophisticated sniper rifle,” said Carlson. The man, Mr. Alawi, was arrested and “paraded through the village back to the patrol base.” There, a Human Terrain Team’s cultural expert, Dr. Ammar, questioned Alawi further and decided he was not a radical but a “kindly old school teacher.” His books, said Carlson, were textbooks from a school. The scope was from an air rifle that he used to shoot birds.

According to Major Carlson, if the Human Terrain Team had not been present, the coalition forces would not have understood how important it was to restore Alawi’s honor. They simply would have released him and let him return to his house on his own. This would have been a grave mistake, said Dr. Ammar, who instructed the soldiers on the specifics of honor restoration. In the
Army-sanctioned story, Major Carlson did not elaborate on what the specifics of honor restoration entail, nor did he explain what happened to the gung-ho Shi’ite interpreters who presented their U.S. Army employers with false information. According to Carlson, “the news [of the honor restoration] spread like wildfire.” Instead of having created a foe in Mr. Alawi, they had created a friend. The son of the village elder showed Major Carlson where an IED was buried and where eighty mortar tubes were hidden. “That is the power of understanding and operating appropriately within a culture,” said Major Carlson.

A second Pentagon narrative, conveyed by the Navy, held that work done by the Human Terrain Teams sometimes seemed futile but had positive outcomes later on. This narrative is exemplified by the writings of Human Terrain Team advisor Norman Nigh. In “An Operator’s Guide to Human Terrain Teams,” written for the U.S. Naval War College’s Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups, Nigh asks, when considering counterinsurgency doctrine and COIN application, “Can doctrine be applied despite an unwilling population?” To answer the question, he tells the story of an Afghan village elder called Haji Malma.

Norman Nigh was a member of a Human Terrain Team attached to a group of coalition forces from Canada, assigned to the village of Nakhonay, Afghanistan, located about ten miles southwest of Kandahar, in the Taliban heartland, not far from where Paula Loyd was set on fire. Most of the soldiers on Nigh’s combat patrol despised Haji Malma, “a stoic village elder, known Taliban judge, and suspected architect of countless Canadian deaths.” For several years, NATO forces had been trying to build a case against Haji Malma and other Taliban leaders like him, but could not. Malma reveled in the fact that there was nothing the coalition forces could do to him, Nigh says. “Like most sophisticated Taliban leaders in Afghanistan,” Nigh explains, “Malma was taking advantage of [America’s] COIN war. On the surface, he appeared
to be a benign village elder, interested only in the well-being of the people of Nakhonay,” when in fact he was a “key Pakistani-educated Al-Qaida supporter who controlled one of the most dangerous and strategically important areas in Kandahar.”

Haji Malma regularly sought development funds from aid organizations and NATO troops, and regularly received financial support. The same went for the rest of the duplicitous elders running Nakhonay village affairs. The Human Terrain Team found that the situation was infuriating soldiers, who were “unable to realize justice for the friends they’ve lost.” This, says Nigh, was dangerous for the broader effort in Afghanistan, since “these heightened emotions often blur an operator’s ability to understand the population and wage an effective COIN war.”

The Human Terrain Team suggested that coalition forces, in this case Task Force Kandahar, “pull back and take a long-horizon perspective.” Nigh and his colleagues determined that Afghanistan was “a country that lacks a rule of law,” ranking 176 out of 178 on the State Department’s Corruption Perception Index. “Corruption and kickbacks of public procurement act as a necessary evil to mitigate risk, leverage against liabilities, and promote cooperation.” The Human Terrain Team also conducted a comprehensive ethnographic study on the topic of corruption, interviewing the majority of villagers and asking them what they thought. “Virtually the entire village agreed that the Western term ‘bribery’ was nothing more than
tarrun,
an Afghan word for contract or agreement,” Nigh explained.

Right around this same time, Task Force Kandahar was preparing for what was called a “clearing operation” in the area—the removal of Taliban leaders and the installation of more coalition-friendly men. But in the opinion of the Human Terrain Team, “many previous clearing operations had resulted in little to no change.” They suggested a different strategy, something Nigh referred to as the “oil spot plan… to divide and conquer the population.” The oil spot COIN strategy worked analogously to the
way cheesecloth works, writes Nigh, with each drop of oil representing a stability initiative, or a municipal service, or an offer of agricultural development assistance. “Drops of oil, one at a time and over time, eventually cover the entire cloth,” according to Nigh, “each oil spot [representing] a visible manifestation of the desired end state for the entire war.” The oil spot concept was a strategy endorsed by Dr. Karl Slaikeu, the psychologist and conflict resolution specialist who replaced Paula Loyd. The oil spot strategy was put into effect in Nakhonay, and in his Naval War College narrative Nigh writes, “The strategy appears to be working.” The international press did not agree. In an October 2010 issue of
Military World Magazine,
published in England, Nakhonay would be described as “a town now infamous as a killing zone.”

The mainstream press largely disparaged the program as the deaths of Human Terrain Team members made headline news. Michael Bhatia, an anthropologist with degrees from Brown University and Oxford University, and who was working on a Ph.D. dissertation on the mujahedeen of Afghanistan, was killed in May 2008 while traveling through Khost, Afghanistan. His unit was en route to help negotiate a peace process between two warring tribes when his vehicle drove over an IED buried in the road. Witnesses say the explosion was loud, horrific, and all-consuming. Bhatia and two Army soldiers were instantly killed. As an Associated Press article about his death put it, “Michael Bhatia was on the frontlines of a Pentagon experiment.” The following month, in Iraq, Human Terrain Team member Nicole Suveges, a political scientist from Johns Hopkins University, was also killed by an IED, planted by terrorists inside a district council building in Sadr City. Killed alongside Suveges were eleven other people, military and civilian, including U.S. soldiers, Iraqi government officials, and U.S. Embassy personnel. Her team was trying to identify ways that ordinary Iraqi citizens could learn how to assist a transitioning government achieve their political aims, according to the Pentagon.

The Human Terrain System continued to grow. In 2010 it was reported that team members earned $200,000 a year. Ever vilified by the press, Human Terrain Team members were likened to de facto intelligence agents because the judgments they provided to coalition forces about who was friend and who was foe often amounted to who would live and who would die. Comparisons were made to the CIA’s Vietnam-era Phoenix and CORDS programs, whereby the CIA enlisted local Vietnamese leaders to help choose targets for assassination. The truth about the Human Terrain System was hidden in plain sight. It was, truly, about human terrain. In the same way that cartographers map terrain, the U.S. Army was mapping people. The program supported DARPA’s technology-driven concept of creating Combat Zones That See.

Each day, after going out on patrol, Human Terrain System members fed information into a mega-database, called Map-HT, or Mapping Human Terrain. Map-HT uses a suite of computer tools to record data gathered by Army intelligence officers, Human Terrain Team members, and coalition forces, including HUMINT and BIOINT. All the information is uploaded into a massive database. Some of the information is sent to the Human Terrain System Reach-Back Research Center at Fort Leavenworth. The more sensitive information “is stored in a classified facility at the National Ground Intelligence Center, outside Charlottesville, Virginia,” says former Army lieutenant colonel Troy Techau, who served as director of the Biometrics Program of U.S. Central Command J2X in post-invasion Iraq.

When retired vice admiral Arthur Cebrowski told
PBS News-Hour
that network-centric warfare was about “the behavior of humans in the networked environment,” he was speaking factually. To fight the war on terror, the Pentagon would collect, synthesize, and analyze information on as many humans as possible, and maintain that information in classified and unclassified networked databases.

“People use human networks to organize the control of resources and geography,” explains Tristan Reed, an analyst with the private intelligence firm Stratfor Intelligence. “No person alone can control anything of significance. Presidents, drug lords, and CEOs rely on people to execute their strategies and are constrained by the capabilities and interests of the people who work for them.”

Afghanistan was a nation controlled by warlords. Iraq was a nation controlled by religious militia groups. The Pentagon needed to understand who was controlling what, and how. Mapping the terrain of individual humans was a means of connecting the networks’ data points. In 2012, coalition forces withdrew from Iraq, and with them the Human Terrain Teams. In Afghanistan, thirty-one teams continued to map the human terrain. Army intelligence took over parts of the program from JIEDDO and retooled it for “Phase Zero pre-conflict,” or the phase before the next war.

“Whether it’s counterinsurgency, or whether it’s Phase Zero pre-conflict, there are critical questions to ask before you decide on a course of action or if you decide to take any action,” says U.S. Army colonel Sharon Hamilton, who directs the program. “If we raise the level of understanding [among the U.S. military], we establish a context baseline of beliefs, values, dreams and aspirations, needs, requirements, security—if we can do all that in Phase Zero, we might not be talking about being somewhere else for 10 years.” As of 2014, there are MAP-HT teams operating all over the globe, from Africa to Mexico.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, by 2011 the Army had intrusively mapped the human terrain of at least 3.7 million foreigners, many of whom were enemy combatants in war zones. Apart from the effectiveness of any of that work—and as of 2015 the Islamic State controlled much of Iraq, while Afghanistan was spiraling into further chaos—there exists an important question for Americans to consider. In the summer of 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden released classified information that showed the National Security
Agency had a clandestine data-mining surveillance program in place, called PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect information on millions of American citizens. Both of these programs had origins in DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program. In the wake of the Snowden leak, the NSA admitted, after first denying, that it does collect information on millions of Americans but stated that none of the information is synthesized or analyzed without a warrant. But the data are all stored in classified NSA facilities, available for NSA reach-back. Is the NSA mapping the human terrain in America in this same way?

Several data-mining surveillance programs described in the fiscal year 2015 budget estimate for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency raise privacy concerns. For its biomedical technology program, an element of “bio-warfare defense,” DARPA requested from Congress $112 million to develop a technology “to allow medical practitioners the capability to visualize and comprehend the complex relationships across patient data in the electronic medical records system.” Specifically, the technologies being developed ostensibly would allow practitioners “to assimilate and analyze large amounts of data and provide tools to make better-informed decisions for patient care.” It is not clear under what authority patient data would be shared with the federal government, and DARPA declined to answer questions for this book.

The Nexus 7 program, whose 2015 budget was classified, monitors social media networks. Specifically, Nexus 7 “applies forecasting, data extraction and analysis methodologies to develop tools, techniques and frameworks for [examining] social networks.” The classified program was used operationally in Afghanistan by a unit called DARPA Forward Cell and won the Defense Department Joint Meritorious Unit Award. From 2007 to 2011, dozens of DARPA personnel traveled “far behind enemy lines… to ensure the latest research and technological advances inform their efforts,” according to DARPA literature associated with the award. The unit
emplaced High-Altitude LIDAR Operations Experiment (HALOE) sensors into the battle space as well as Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER) pods. How Nexus 7 is used in the United States is classified, and DARPA declined to answer general questions.