my take on HTS is quite different. I think it was all pretend, a Potemkin Village that the empire built, in a way, to persuade itself how much it cared and also how it was going to do the same old thing a new special magic way that THIS TIME was gonna WORK.
You didn't need a special team of anthropologists to probe how the Taliban was feeling. The Taliban told the U.S. how it was feeling: "get the fuck out". It wasn't like a special secret you had to palpate with your delicate anthropological instruments to discern. And it's not like there were not one gajillion published analyses of that part of the world already that were like: "hey you should get the fuck out now, they are going to eat you for real same as they ate the British and the Russians"
The U.S. didn't want the facts to be the facts, they didn't want to look like stupid assholes doing the same thing prior stupid assholes had tried, so they were like "we are not assholes we hired Caring Brigades of Touchy Feely Anthropologists" and also "we are not stupid we are using Innovative Brigades of Anthropological Type Scientifermusses" and then that ended...
the way it always ended, which they could have figured out from reading even one book that told them things they didn't want to hear, even if that one book was a Flashman novel.
I am reminded of Alistair Horne's comment on the French military's concept of la guerre Revolutionnaire, developed in the 1950s and 60s in response to insurgencies in Indochina and Algeria: "modish and arrogant".
Even T. E. Lawrence wasn't exactly embraced by us. The Middle East would probably be a very different place today if more note had been taken. We totally forgot why we'd propped up the Ottomans for a century in the first place. That was the one of the very first things that crossed my mind; that the Afghan king should be restored. Meddling in the Afghan succession was were we came in and perhaps the one mistake we should bloody well have known not to repeat.
The RC East Human Terrain Team worked out a deal with their commander to spend Thursday nights at the Taj Guesthouse for its weekly Tiki Bar happy hour. In 2008 we would attract maybe 40 or 50 internationals every Thursday as we had the only bar in Nangarhar province and the HTT got a ton of useful information by talking with the NGO and security contractors who lived and worked outside the wire. But they were gathering “atmospherics” which is essentially human intelligence collected by people without security clearances.
Great article. I was trying to remember where I’d seen this story before and I remembered that Gary Brecker (John Dolan) who used to blog as The War Nerd, wrote a personal two-part account of his dealings with the woman behind the human terrain project, but it seems to have disappeared from the internet. If you or anyone else can find it, it makes for compelling reading.
They could save 100s of millions of dollars if the soldiers were allowed to Marry the local single woman. Marry and setup homes, have children, promote Christianity with tolerance towards Muslims. You have to mix at the heart level not the brain level.
Translators would have been more useful than anthropologists. It sounds like the program was more successful when it operated at a small scale than at a large one.
Had the program been limited to anthropological indoctrination for translators and officers during night school, probably under civilian auspices, again with a much smaller budget, it would have been more successful. The problem there is that, to put it mildly, the DoD and the State department do not get along well with each other.
So it is with all new things: first small-scale tests are done by enthusiastic people who either came up with idea or were inspired by it.
When you have people like that, everything works better than old ways done by NPC:s "just doing their job".
Then when you expand your program, those NPC:s are put to try doing things your way, while probably not understanding why, and atleast not being as familiar with it as with old ways.
The last paragraph or so really brings the point home, and methinks the tensions arising from American self-delusion and dominance are reflected in our domestic squabbles. How can the land of the free square itself up with the age-old impulse to take other, weaker people’s stuff, be it material, social, or cultural? We thought we had the answer, then the Cold War ended and its certainties evaporated.
Bloody hypocrites. Your ENTIRE country is "stolen"! :-) That, and multi-ethnic states are empires by definition. I'd argue the dishonesty and cognitive dissonance made things a lot worse. We have to own it: West Is Best; Forget The Rest.
Tush, my dear. Are you unaware that those to our north and west, who fancifully describe themselves as Celts, say the same to us? The very name of our homeland derives from a Germanic tribal people who occupied the the region of Angeln in southern Jutland.
As to your strategy of 'forget the rest', the difficulty is, to paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in the rest but the rest are interested in you. Iran seems determined to bring about Armageddon; Russian revanchism inches closer to us, and China plays the long-game, seeking to make itself unassailable. Each feeds itself upon grievance against us. We do well to study these matters and, most especially, not to wantonly antagonise our brothers and sisters across the pond - lest they decide to leave us to the kind mercies of our enemies.
Thanks for that. We may not be quite as close as the one people divided by a common language that we once were - as one of your better known PMs put it - but the ‘special relationship’ will likely persist indefinitely, or at least for a few more months (haha). That intemperate crack begged a response, because if anything we could use some alternatives to our two tired, worn out political parties and personally I’d like to see something like an American labor party join the fray over here, but it will never get off the ground if repeating the long list of our historical sins is the highest priority. Such a thing would not necessarily be an attempt to duplicate the UK original but it could help clarify for many voters how they’ve been sold out or taken for granted by the powers that be on this side of the pond. Unfortunately culture war snark seems to have the upper hand. Like junk food it’s gratifying for a minute or two but a poor substitute for the real thing and the fuel needed for more serious grassroots politics.
Nice to hear from an impudent limey about world domination. Still sore about 1776? The War of 1812? Geez, have a warm beer and chill, for christsake. (FWIW, blaming all of us over on this side of the pond today for past sins invites the same directed your way, in case you missed my point.) Anyway, there were a lot of Americans who were reluctant to get involved in WWII because they’d come over to escape the same Great Power machinations that produced the meat grinder of the Somme, etc. They didn’t’t embrace the same status for their adopted home. They just answered the same call to God and country their fore bearers in the old country did. They constituted the bulk of the workforce for the various projects the pols committed them to, and now we’re all in a new time.
Both sides did win. The following is the final paragraph of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on the War of 1812; the lead author of which is a professor of history at the US Air Force Academy. Evidence, one might say, of the truth of the claim made.
"The most enduring international consequence of the war was in the arbitration clauses of Ghent, perhaps the treaty’s most important feature. Its arrangements to settle outstanding disagreements established methods that could adapt to changing U.S. administrations, British ministries, and world events. There lay the seeds of an Anglo-American comity that would weather future disagreements to sustain the longest unfortified border in the world."
my take on HTS is quite different. I think it was all pretend, a Potemkin Village that the empire built, in a way, to persuade itself how much it cared and also how it was going to do the same old thing a new special magic way that THIS TIME was gonna WORK.
You didn't need a special team of anthropologists to probe how the Taliban was feeling. The Taliban told the U.S. how it was feeling: "get the fuck out". It wasn't like a special secret you had to palpate with your delicate anthropological instruments to discern. And it's not like there were not one gajillion published analyses of that part of the world already that were like: "hey you should get the fuck out now, they are going to eat you for real same as they ate the British and the Russians"
The U.S. didn't want the facts to be the facts, they didn't want to look like stupid assholes doing the same thing prior stupid assholes had tried, so they were like "we are not assholes we hired Caring Brigades of Touchy Feely Anthropologists" and also "we are not stupid we are using Innovative Brigades of Anthropological Type Scientifermusses" and then that ended...
the way it always ended, which they could have figured out from reading even one book that told them things they didn't want to hear, even if that one book was a Flashman novel.
I am reminded of Alistair Horne's comment on the French military's concept of la guerre Revolutionnaire, developed in the 1950s and 60s in response to insurgencies in Indochina and Algeria: "modish and arrogant".
Even T. E. Lawrence wasn't exactly embraced by us. The Middle East would probably be a very different place today if more note had been taken. We totally forgot why we'd propped up the Ottomans for a century in the first place. That was the one of the very first things that crossed my mind; that the Afghan king should be restored. Meddling in the Afghan succession was were we came in and perhaps the one mistake we should bloody well have known not to repeat.
The RC East Human Terrain Team worked out a deal with their commander to spend Thursday nights at the Taj Guesthouse for its weekly Tiki Bar happy hour. In 2008 we would attract maybe 40 or 50 internationals every Thursday as we had the only bar in Nangarhar province and the HTT got a ton of useful information by talking with the NGO and security contractors who lived and worked outside the wire. But they were gathering “atmospherics” which is essentially human intelligence collected by people without security clearances.
Great article. I was trying to remember where I’d seen this story before and I remembered that Gary Brecker (John Dolan) who used to blog as The War Nerd, wrote a personal two-part account of his dealings with the woman behind the human terrain project, but it seems to have disappeared from the internet. If you or anyone else can find it, it makes for compelling reading.
Human Terrain Teams may have been a miserable failure in Iraq and Afghanistan but so far a resounding success when directed at its own population.
So many words wasted when Reality is so simple and funnier!
https://postimg.cc/ykgmngMP
They could save 100s of millions of dollars if the soldiers were allowed to Marry the local single woman. Marry and setup homes, have children, promote Christianity with tolerance towards Muslims. You have to mix at the heart level not the brain level.
Translators would have been more useful than anthropologists. It sounds like the program was more successful when it operated at a small scale than at a large one.
Had the program been limited to anthropological indoctrination for translators and officers during night school, probably under civilian auspices, again with a much smaller budget, it would have been more successful. The problem there is that, to put it mildly, the DoD and the State department do not get along well with each other.
So it is with all new things: first small-scale tests are done by enthusiastic people who either came up with idea or were inspired by it.
When you have people like that, everything works better than old ways done by NPC:s "just doing their job".
Then when you expand your program, those NPC:s are put to try doing things your way, while probably not understanding why, and atleast not being as familiar with it as with old ways.
The last paragraph or so really brings the point home, and methinks the tensions arising from American self-delusion and dominance are reflected in our domestic squabbles. How can the land of the free square itself up with the age-old impulse to take other, weaker people’s stuff, be it material, social, or cultural? We thought we had the answer, then the Cold War ended and its certainties evaporated.
Bloody hypocrites. Your ENTIRE country is "stolen"! :-) That, and multi-ethnic states are empires by definition. I'd argue the dishonesty and cognitive dissonance made things a lot worse. We have to own it: West Is Best; Forget The Rest.
Tush, my dear. Are you unaware that those to our north and west, who fancifully describe themselves as Celts, say the same to us? The very name of our homeland derives from a Germanic tribal people who occupied the the region of Angeln in southern Jutland.
As to your strategy of 'forget the rest', the difficulty is, to paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in the rest but the rest are interested in you. Iran seems determined to bring about Armageddon; Russian revanchism inches closer to us, and China plays the long-game, seeking to make itself unassailable. Each feeds itself upon grievance against us. We do well to study these matters and, most especially, not to wantonly antagonise our brothers and sisters across the pond - lest they decide to leave us to the kind mercies of our enemies.
Thanks for that. We may not be quite as close as the one people divided by a common language that we once were - as one of your better known PMs put it - but the ‘special relationship’ will likely persist indefinitely, or at least for a few more months (haha). That intemperate crack begged a response, because if anything we could use some alternatives to our two tired, worn out political parties and personally I’d like to see something like an American labor party join the fray over here, but it will never get off the ground if repeating the long list of our historical sins is the highest priority. Such a thing would not necessarily be an attempt to duplicate the UK original but it could help clarify for many voters how they’ve been sold out or taken for granted by the powers that be on this side of the pond. Unfortunately culture war snark seems to have the upper hand. Like junk food it’s gratifying for a minute or two but a poor substitute for the real thing and the fuel needed for more serious grassroots politics.
Nice to hear from an impudent limey about world domination. Still sore about 1776? The War of 1812? Geez, have a warm beer and chill, for christsake. (FWIW, blaming all of us over on this side of the pond today for past sins invites the same directed your way, in case you missed my point.) Anyway, there were a lot of Americans who were reluctant to get involved in WWII because they’d come over to escape the same Great Power machinations that produced the meat grinder of the Somme, etc. They didn’t’t embrace the same status for their adopted home. They just answered the same call to God and country their fore bearers in the old country did. They constituted the bulk of the workforce for the various projects the pols committed them to, and now we’re all in a new time.
I'm pretty sure both sides think they won the war of 1812.
Both sides did win. The following is the final paragraph of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on the War of 1812; the lead author of which is a professor of history at the US Air Force Academy. Evidence, one might say, of the truth of the claim made.
"The most enduring international consequence of the war was in the arbitration clauses of Ghent, perhaps the treaty’s most important feature. Its arrangements to settle outstanding disagreements established methods that could adapt to changing U.S. administrations, British ministries, and world events. There lay the seeds of an Anglo-American comity that would weather future disagreements to sustain the longest unfortified border in the world."
Crazy how there are still so many r—ded f—ts even in our neck of the woods. Piss of back to the daily wire