General Dave’s Map Shows Human Terrain Really Continues East into Afghanistan and Pakistan!
May 16, 2009
by George Thomas
Bi-products of unwise foreign policy have afflicted us before, and they will probably afflict us again. Such is the stability of cultural values and, generally speaking, today’s Neoconservatives have never accepted that fact. So many believe we can construct Disneyland in far-off lands for our entertainment.
Sometimes we make blanket condemnation of everyone involved, one way or other, in the Iraq-Afghanistan-BushWar mess. This is not particularly helpful. It’s even wrong, so wrong. Take for example the normal-guy and gal ignoramuses caught up and eventually charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. They reaped the most damaging negative sanctions, even though they held relatively little responsibility. Policy makers, as we speak, remain on the lam so far.
I can’t say enough about the callow, naive folks in charge of much leadership and responsibility within many military organizations. Sometimes training and education include the mistakes made early in a career. But when these mistakes become really, really public and visible, and become the main point of contention in international brouhaha, it can scar a young, naive – let’s face it, stupid, callow mind well into adulthood, regardless of whether that mind ran like a well-oiled engine of genius proportions.
Then there are the real culprits — leaders who rode a string of contrived moral “outrage” campaigns to power because they were frankly tired, tired of waiting for real solutions to work. Real solutions take patience and nuanced expertise. People like Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Grover Norquist and a whole host of neoliberals had become impatient. They wanted the world to morph into Disneyland during their lifetimes.
You see, these guys were so solidly utopian in their neoliberal ideology that they inspired the coinage of the new, meaningless label, “neoconservative.” We had met the dreaded “Neocons.”
Gen. David Petraeus was somewhat different. Relatively speaking, it’s a good thing Petraeus was tapped for leadership as the BushWar fiasco began to crumble, and the “blowback” predicted as early as Oct. 2001 – while dust from the collapsed WTC towers still hung in portions of the New York City downtown air – became more than a disgruntled, leftie, academic Chicken Little whine. Never mind that the mention of “blowback” issued from the CIA.
Petraeus came from educated, elite, Ph.D.-valuing, academic-mongering stock, and had the ability to sell relative sanity to the rest of the military establishment. Up ‘til then, military leadership had habitually balked at the notion that, say, anthropologists could inform foreign policy and military doctrine. In a turnabout, and a rather breathtaking one at that, under Petraeus military strategists and theorists brainstormed the oddly cloak-and-dagger concept of “Human Terrain Systems.”
Terrain is a special term in mil-speak. It isn’t limited only to the lay of the land, hills, streams, valleys, lakes, vegetation and lack thereof. It also encompasses “lines of communication” (roads, phone lines, utilities, buildings, nuclear plants, factories, etc.). It also encompasses cultural geography, or living, breathing people and their societies.
Hence the sudden attraction for Margaret Mead clones to be directed away from treating Major Hoople as a gorilla for study, or Colonel Klink as an informant from a Samoan village, and toward “understanding the people living within the ‘theater’ of military concern.” Welcome back to the conventional military intelligence concept of “know-thy-enemy.” The concept is an ideal that has rarely if ever been achieved.
So while remnant Bush-inspired military policy error continues in consequence like a runaway train months after Bush has left office, and while “collateral damage” continues as one of many bi-products of “kinetic action,” little armies of geeks in glasses carry clipboards and gain local trust (and yes, hearts and minds while they’re at it), even though clothed in military uniforms.
The new strategy was a good idea, relatively speaking. Reasonable people can disagree now over whether it allowed the collection of too little information too late. Debates continue over whether the US military should depart the Iraq-Afghanistan “theater” sooner or later. Less debate circulates over whether the US broke it, and now it’s up to them to fix it. That explains some remaining European reluctance to send thousands of heavily-armed, substantially-backed, uniformed, semi-educated agents with glasses and clipboards to Uncle Sam’s aid.
Margaret Mead would be intrigued, and might see parallels from her days working for military intel during WWII. General Petraeus recently warned of hard times ahead for the US military operations in Afghanistan. Of course there are dangers “looming.” It’ll require years of “area experts”, swarming through villages, cities and backcountry of Afghanistan, communicating, asking questions about things that matter to the locals, and trying to regain some basis for trust.
Trouble is, many will be armed and in uniform, and someday the major policy makers in huge, distant centers of industrial power will convert back to arrogant, unsustainable policies about which Europe’s old colonial powers rightfully warn us. Local Pashtun chieftains can be excused for wondering at the inconsistencies. Legions of Afghani and Pakistani people can be excused for joining quasi-traditional, non-rational, reactionary movements.
Yes, it really is all deja-vu. Wakan tonka help us all…….
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